558519 - Starburst/asterisk overlay indicating new E-mail in folder pane icon too faint and hard to see in TB3

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 608864

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect)

Description

[Michelle]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 3.0.4

The star for the new e-mail is much more faint than in 2.0 & it's hard to see which folders have new mail. (see attachment - ok, I must be exhausted, I can't find the area to attach a file.)

Thanks


Michelle

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Michelle]

Attachment: TB star for new mail

Figured the attachment issue out

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

in the folder pane?

Comment 3

[Michelle]

The left one, yes.


Michelle

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot: strong TB2 and faint TB3 new mail star in folder pane

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Comment on attachment 439045 [details]
Screenshot: strong TB2 and faint TB3 new mail star in folder pane

(In reply to comment #2)
> in the folder pane?
Screenshot attachment 438234 [details] was taken from the message list.
But it's actually worse on the folder pane (-> confirming):

Screenshot attachment 439045 [details] compares new mail stars on folder pane (tb2 vs. tb3).
In tb3 folder pane, the star is really almost invisible, and it looks smeared, as proven in the magnified view. At best, it's some fuzzy spot or seal on the envelope, but certainly no longer recognizable as a star. TB2's star looks a lot better, i. e. clearer.

Bryan, you think visual improvement would be desirable?

Questions:
- as seen in screenshot attachment 439045 [details], we no longer show the new mail star on the inbox itself - is this intended? Rationale?

- btw: can someone enlighten me on the meaning of the lock on the envelope, which complicates the tb3 account icon furthermore?

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

the lock means the account is SSL protected and the like.

We seem to be spinning with the icon/color representation for new messages....

For exactly the reasons stated here I thought last fall new message indicator changed from being a star, to color and no star (I can't find the dang bug#). There have been legitimate bugs filed about color issues (eg Bug 523972). But then, recently, to my dismay it changed back to star and no color (I can't find that bug either - I'm having a super bad day).


xref Bug 494777 regarding RSS

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> to my dismay it changed back to star and no color (I can't find that bug 

bug 533695?

Comment 8

[Michelle]

I'd love to see a SS of no star, but color, b4 you guys roll anything out. Not sure where you intend to put the color.

Hope you find it & have a better day :  )


Mich

Comment 9

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

this bug feels like bug 562934 perhaps we should merge them together

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #9)
> this bug feels like bug 562934 perhaps we should merge them together

bug 562934 is a trunk regression about text color, fixable hopefully be simply backing out part of bug 533695.  Conversely, this bug is a v2->v3 regression about icons, which iirc already received some improvements - but perhaps did not go far enough? (I don't know bug#s) Plus each may have platform dependent issues.  I think these distinctions indicate the bugs should be handled separately.

Comment 11

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Comment on attachment 439045 [details]
Screenshot: strong TB2 and faint TB3 new mail star in folder pane

It does seem like we could improve the visibility of the star.  I think the old one was a little too jagged and "old" but we could keep a cleaner rounder star that is just a little larger than what we currently have.

Comment 12

[D Holzmman]

and whatever happened with this?

bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=596190  596190 is more important, IMHO.

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Here's what Andreas said in duplicate Bug 555270:

(In reply to Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn) from Bug 555270 comment #3, 2010-03-30)
> The old asterisk, while being slightly easier to spot, also screamed Windows
> 95.
> I wanted to make Thunderbird blend into newer Windows versions such as Vista
> and Win7 better.
> 
> I also experimented with colored text for new messages, a very visible
> indicator for new messages but that got shot down, so the asterisk made it's
> return.
> 
> If patches are made with a more visible asterisks and it still looks good in
> Win7, or if there are other good approaches to indicate new e-mail, I'm
> happy to accept them.

Comment 15

[Josiah Bruner [:jsbruner]]

Duping to bug 608864 since more work was done on that bug.