DrunkenBlog

GyazMail wide-screen

Continuing my quest for a decent wide-screen mail reader in OSX... I pretty much gave up. Since I had some time last night waiting on the testing peeps, I figured since we're just talking panes, modifying their nibs shouldn't be too hard, right? So I grabbed and made copies of the GyazMail, Mail, and GNUmail bundles.

I tried Apple's Mail first, which didn't go well. Everything seemed to go well, but it seems to do something strange with its custom view in its mail view, so I kept getting the content cut off.

GyazMail was easy, really. GyazMail basically has 2-pane and 3-pane modes:

2-pane

Pretty basic view... mailbox + individual message. You can keep good track of all the messages, and open each individual message in a new window. On a tech list this is a big deal, as the messages are longer and will often have bits of code.

This one isn't so bad, as I have key combos set up so that I don't really ever need to leave the keyboard. Hit "N" and it shows the next message, etc. It still gets a bit wearing, though. Especially when I'm flipping between different boxes & messages.

3-pane

This is the one a lot of people are familiar with. Standard mac way to view mail since eMailer (R.I.P.).

This view allows you to quickly get the fist of a message, and read further if you want. But since iBooks & Powerbooks, you are constantly scrolling through messages, even if you can hit the space bar it's still annoying. It also makes it more difficult to get a mental snapshot of the message, especially if there are bits of code.

So more than anything, I'm having to switch between 2-pane and 3-pane throughout the day.

Wide-screen version

I actually got a little annoyed while messing with GyazMail while doing this, which isn't it's fault, as it was just too damned easy compared to Apple's Mail. If you have the developer tools installed, it'll take you all of 5 minutes.

Here's a shot of it (click for larger):

This actually works really well, considering, especially on my powerbook which is wide-screen. I'm using it as I type this out. The only real problem is that the mailbox viewer isn't really setup for this kind of viewing, especially with how the threading is done.

But even still I'm using it, as it gives me the benefits of 3-pane and 2-pane, I can just use the arrow keys to go down through threads. Saves me a lot of scrolling & clicks.

Unfortunately there's no real way for me to change how the mailbox view is handled without the source, which means I'd have to start looking at something like GNUmail instead, which is open source.

Optimal wide-screen version

But here's a quick mock-up I did of what I'd ideally like to see, since modifying GyazMail went so fast. And no, it's not perfect, but I spent all of 15 minutes on it.

• Included a "sort by" menu item above the mailbox view, as it wouldn't be that efficient to keep the same column-clickable views unless you were on a monster screen. You'd want to remove "address" and call it "ascending" or "descending", and when its clicked it changes how the items are sorted. The rest would be touch up stuff, which I don't really have the time for at the moment.
• Moved the subject under the author, and moved threading to just indent once under the main thread. I moved the date into the middle of the row, just to help break up the space, but you'd probably want to have the size of the message or something under it.
• You wouldn't really need the scroll bars at the bottom anyways if there'd be nothing to scroll... I don't know why GyazMail insists on leaving them in anyways.
• I alternated threads with a color, basically a 5% shade of black. I've kind of wanted to see this in the real version anyways, along with a "delete thread" command, as it just looks nice and improves scannability.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    January 21, 2004, at 06:17 PM