Signatures in Email

Last week I was blitzed by being cc’d on a lot of email signature related bugs. :-)  To remain calm and keep delusions of control active I started on a wiki page for Message Signatures in Thunderbird.  Right now the page contains lots of links to relevant areas and ascii art mockups for choosing a default signature for accounts; it’s meant to collect thoughts, research, and define direction.

Managing Signatures

I think a general improvement plan will involve simplifying the signature selection and creation process.  Here are a number of points that I think can improve the current aspects of signature management.

• Each account is created a default signature (from the person’s name and organization)
• Every signature can be edited with a built-in signature editor (created from the compose window)
• Signatures can be imported from files, but are saved in the Thunderbird profile or preferences (see bug 324495)
• A separate dialog is used for managing all signatures, with import, add, edit, remove actions as well as a link to see the signature extensions available from AMO.

Concept Mockup of Signature Chooser in Account Settings

Using Signatures

In the relevant extensions section of the wiki page I tried to list most of the extensions that are dealing with how to use signatures in the compose window.  There are a number of ways of solving this problem and lots of issues surrounding posting style that I am hesitant to battle with.

Several bugs (see bug 219197, bug 73567, and bug 37644) have suggestions that attack the problem from different angles.  New comments and suggestions are welcome!

ASCII Art Side Note

I think I’ve started to use Johan’s ASCII Art Mockup post as a reference for my own ascii art; it’s good to see some style written down somewhere.

Syndicated 2008-05-14 14:18:16 from Bryan Clark

A bit of a Communication Problem

I’ve been doing some testing recently with Thunderbird and it’s offline support; trying to get a handle on what the state of the onion is.  One problem that has bothered me is the silent state of online to offline, not to mention the dialogs that happen after that.

Communication

How do you convey that Thunderbird is offline or online? I’m not too sure of the implementation yet but I think we can get some excellent ideas when examining IM clients and how they handle online vs. offline; for email it’s just a little less extreme.

Online

Should have some indication that is available, but not too prominent because this is the state where everything is good.  When you’re online, emails will be sent right away and new messages will arrive, we don’t need a large piece of real estate to inform you that the situation is normal.

Simple and obvious green signal that you’re online

Offline

Requires a clear indication that is prominent and obvious.  Auto-reconnection should be the default and  timeouts created that indicate when the next reconnect will take place; allow people to interrupt and reconnect immediately.

You’re grey and offline, do you want to try going online now? I’ll try in a little bit anyway…

Because for email we can also expect that some people will want to be offline intentionally we need to allow for people to remove the indication and include ways for people to tell Thunderbird to stop trying to auto-reconnect.

Getting Back Online

When you’ve finally reconnected it’s a moment for celebration… Yay! Get back to work!!  This kind of notification allows people to understand that you’ve reconnected and things will be back to normal.

Getting back online from an offline state can also incur some syncing and likely heavy network traffic so for those reasons alone it’s good to let people know that Thunderbird has realized the new online state and is going to start doing it’s business again. Hold on to your butts…

Woo Hoo! We’re back online!

Some Caveats

We examined an IM client with a single account.  There are some extra things about Thunderbird and email that need to be considered, here’s just one:  You could have multiple email accounts and only a few are not connecting.  What does it look like to have the account you’re focused on online and another account offline?  What does the opposite look like?

Syndicated 2008-05-14 01:56:51 from Bryan Clark

Auto-Complete on Subjects

To make an initial start on our new search aspirations we need to begin testing and trying out some of our improved searching ideas.

Quick Search

Our first step in this direction is to add an auto-complete on subjects in the Quick Search entry.  It’s important to get a lot of feedback on our search improvements so integrating our improvements with the current search is paramount. New behaviors need to be pushed out during our alpha releases to gain visibility and testing.  This improvement doesn’t alter the current search behavior at all, everything is planned to act in parallel.

What will change?

The quick search will try to help you find message subjects by auto-completing on the subject name. The subjects it offers for auto-complete are searched from the available subjects in the folder Thunderbird displays in the current view.

For Example:

• <address>Type in the name “address” into the quick search entry</address>
• <address>The auto-complete will give a list that match the word “address” somewhere in the subject</address>
• Selecting an item in the list will complete the whole subject name and search the message view for that name

Lo-fi mockup of Quick Search Auto-Complete on Subject

The auto-complete is only planned to work for subjects at the moment.  Hopefully we’ll be able to start expanding this soon to include email addresses and names too.  Once we have some experience with the auto-complete widget we can start expanding it’s scope a little.

Here’s the current design for the layout of the rich-item widget for matching message subjects.

There are a couple of other tweaks to the {meta} area that need to be improved.  The light colors are a little hard to see and it might be better to brighten up the sender names.  Also it could be good to add the date the message was sent. Perhaps like this:

$SENDER to $RECIPIENTS $TIME_AGO

ex: Bryan to you,david,gary 3 hours ago

What will stay the same?

The quick search should continue to search only in the current folder / view.  This may change sometime in the future, but only when we have a better solution for that problem.

Also it will still work for searches that aren’t subjects, like senders.  When you select a different search type, like “to or cc”, then it won’t continue to auto-complete on subjects; only when you select “subject” or “subject or sender” types.

When is this happening?

Everything is up in the air for discussion right now as we work through an incremental design that makes sense.  The implementation pieces are going to come together soon when the new toolkit auto-complete widget from firefox is pulled into Thunderbird (see bug 370306 and bug 309081) and we figure out the best strategy for quickly searching a set of subjects from the current view.

Syndicated 2008-05-13 15:20:31 from Bryan Clark

Searching for a new find

It’s time to start looking into a new search method for Thunderbird. One of the major changes planned for Thunderbird is a new and improve search, but what does that mean? <h4>What do we have?</h4>

First lets look at what we have for a search system.  At a very simple level most search systems break down into two pieces, a search interface for filtering and a results interface for listing.  Thunderbird does this in a couple places.

Quick Search

The quick search entry is always at the top right of the Thunderbird window and allows people to search over the current view.  The results of a quick search fill into the current view, replacing whatever listing was previously shown.

The Quick Search defaults to searching only the Subject or Sender and will only search mail that Thunderbird has downloaded already.  Messages that are not listed in the current view (like in another folder) will not be searched unless that folder is selected, otherwise a person needs to use the Advanced Search.

Advanced Search

Hidden under the Edit Menu and Find Sub-Menu is an advanced search dialog that can make use of the remote mail or news protocol to perform a full search instead of just a local search.   The Search Messages dialog provides it’s own search interface as well as it’s own results view directly below the search.  While the Search Messages dialog provides some more advanced search methods over the quick search it’s hard to find and difficult to use effectively.

The Search Messages dialog allows for complex search queries to be built with multiple search terms composed of a number of different field type selectors.  The queries require a lot of input from the user because of the tight structure used to create them.  The same search and results interface code is used for creating mail filters. <tbody> </tbody>

Edit -> Find -> Search Messages…

Advanced Search Dialog

<h4>What do we want?</h4>

I was lucky enough to chat with Andrew Gilmartin yesterday and he framed a future goal very well.  “We’re not looking to make search an added feature box on the side of Thunderbird“, we’re looking to make search the definitive method for viewing mail.

What does “Search as the definitive viewing method for your mail” mean?  That’s a good question and I’m not sure exactly what a good answer is yet. A search would help you find the message you’re looking for, and perhaps a search view never lets you lose that message in the first place.  There’s a lot to explore.

Here are two important pieces of a search system and view that need to be examined and somehow exposed in the interface.

Search and Filter

An impediment of the current search system is requiring people to choose a search type (Subject or Sender) before they even enter any text.  To help people hunt for the correct item you want to allow for starting their search very broad and then allow them to narrow down that broad search with filters like subject or sender.

The current search system has some speed issues that likely prevented a broad to filter system of searching to be implemented.  The mail client Mail.app provides a decent filter bar when searching mail that allows people to see what the current filters are (folder, account) and change them.

Browse and Filter

The SEEK extension is an excellent example of how offering a system of browsing mail by grouped attributes from the start can help people find the item or group of items they were looking for.  Instead of starting with a search term you give the person a list of attributes they might use to filter the list of messages.

An inspiring system for a similar searching, browsing, and filtering methods is things, you should try it if you haven’t already. <h4>Getting What we Want
</h4>

Moving towards a new search based paradigm will take some adventurous steps and it’s important not to disturb current usage while making those steps.  Here are a number of changes to look at making.

Merging Search Interfaces

Each of the two current search interfaces provide some needed features and capabilities, however having two separate interfaces for searching is confusing and difficult to understand.  We need to combine the ability to do a quick search with the ability to perform a full search into a single interface with an improved results view.

With a single search interface Thunderbird will be searching the local and remote mail (like IMAP) at the same time.  However local results will be listing quickly and remote results will likely take a little more time.  Both sets of results, local and remote, can be merged into the same search results view by showing local results instantly and filling in remote results as they arrive.

Offline Cached and Indexed Mail

In order to have a fast search system even while offline Thunderbird needs to do a much better job of caching and indexing mail as it encounters it.  With new messages instantly cached and indexed they can be made available to search queries, filters, and views immediately.

This is an excellent time to start thinking about the data mining mail in a way that helps searching messages later.  It’s also time to think about making the defaults tuned towards offline usage while still allowing people to control online / offline caching.

Auto Complete

With mail data indexed locally and quickly available Thunderbird should be able to provide a slick and fun auto-complete on search terms it knows about.   Auto complete when searching for items you’re already aware exists helps with miss-spelling errors and more complete matching.  The awesomebar shows how with just a little broken memory of a title or url you can easily find the page you saw once before. <h4>Fetching Results</h4>

Our current drive is to investigate some indexing on messages (at least subjects), pull the new auto-complete into Thunderbird, and get a search bar using that fancy auto-complete on mail subjects and hopefully the addition of a couple more fun things.  Leave some comments or jump on the newsgroup to participate.

A wire frame of a possible mail search auto-complete

Syndicated 2008-05-08 18:49:03 from Bryan Clark

Lightning Calendar Month View Hacks

With an hour or so of downtime during the Calendar Face 2 Face meeting this week I started a little CSS hacking of the Lightning Calendar extension.  My goal was to change improve the visual effect of the month view into more of a heat map than a listing of all your events for the month.  I believe the month view should only be answering the question, “What days am I busy, what days am I free?”, while avoiding answering every other possible question.

Old Calendar Month View

Here’s a screenshot of a day in the current month view.  There are dark drop shadows for each event listed, as well a (visually alarming) alarm bell for every event that has an alarm.  The borders are thick 2px lines with a dark color that overwhelms the board.

Effectively there is a lot of visual noise happening with all the different background and dark border shading that makes the view always appear somewhat cluttered. <tbody> </tbody>

Current Month Day View

Current Full Month View

Drawing the Eye

When you start shading the the areas of the calendar in a darker shade than they were before you can begin to see the visual effect created and where they eyes are drawn to.  Places and things that aren’t as important as others.

Plus the extra visual information that is provided in some of the shading isn’t always necessary in the month view.  For example, off month days are now indicated by a lighter shade of font color in the date text instead of a dark background color that makes them look important instead of additional.

Calendar Month Hack

In this screenshot of a single day in the new hacked month view you can see that the borders of days changed to a very light 1px color and the date numbering has been lighted up as well.  I put in a slight background shade for the top border as well to give it some separation (not completely necessary).  The colors and stacking of events in a day provides the necessary separation that the dark border colors were giving before.

In general everything has been flattened so the visual effect is about the colors of the calendar events drawing your eyes to the areas they exist in the most, while the empty parts of the calendar look much more open.

Designer code can be had at bug 430382 and you can see a full month view patch screenshot from there as well.

Next Steps

Start changing the timed events such that they don’t look so visually loud on the board.  Time events, ones that range for a certain time during the day, should appear to be less than an all day event on the visual landscape.

Further Improvements

The text for calendar events is obviously much too verbose.  You can see in the above screenshot that 08:30 AM could easily be changed into 8:30 and still provide the same information while taking less space.

Christian has much more work done for Improved Events and Tasks as well as others areas, all of which need to be merged.

Syndicated 2008-04-28 15:32:21 from Bryan Clark