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Originally Posted by labarum
What happens if you use browser zoom? Does that allow you to tune the theme to your taste? I do agree however, that some adjustment of line spacing would be useful. Some may prefer not to have a line between each row of text. That is unnecessary clutter. Much could be learned from the clean lines of Microsoft's Outlook.com.
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Hmm, I didn't know until now that Firefox has a browser zoom. So, I tried it. It looks like the closest approximation we can get to the classic "Concise" theme is to select "Large Font" theme along with "System font", and set browser zoom to 90%. Now, if there were a way to select colors, that would just about do it. (But having to set browser zoom every time I login to email is a bit annoying.)
However, there's an issue with how headers are displayed. I need to see the "To:" header of each message, because I use a lot of aliases and I need to see what alias each message came in on. In "Large Font" I have to click "Show details", meaning an extra action for every single message I read (which is a lot). Because of this, I'll probably wind up using the so-called "Classic" theme, which displays the headers by default. In that case, I won't be using browser zoom because the font would be too tiny. Sigh... so much for "Concise".
There's an additional issue that the new interface either shows too much header info or not enough. As I mentioned above, the terse version doesn't show me the "To:" address (and I also want to see the full "Date:" header), while the verbose version (via "Show details", or by using the so-called "Classic" theme) takes up extra screen real estate by displaying the Subject twice, the From address twice, the recipient's "real name" twice, and also the Size (which I don't need to see except on the message list page). The classic "Concise" theme displayed the header information exactly as it should, with everything I need to see, and no redundancy.
And that's another reason why I find the classic "Concise" theme superior to anything in the new interface. I really don't understand why they'd allow problems like the above to crop up when those problems had already been solved in the previous implementation. Having worked in the software industry, and knowing the situation with employee turnover, I can only guess that the designers of classic left the company and took with them their rationale for the various design decisions they made.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BritTim
While I sympathize, I can imagine that in the current interface this could not be solved simply with CSS changes, but would involve Javascript changes and also changes in the backend. This would be doable, of course, but needs the developers to agree it is important. If my sense of what is involved is correct, this is a fair bit of work.
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Understood. And this reveals the disadvantage of UI design that is based heavily on JavaScript, Ajax, CSS, and the like. Things that were straightforward in the past, and were actually solved in the past, become difficult or intractable problems. Sure, you get snazzy advantages (like pre-fetch of data, immediate notification of new mail, etc., etc.), but that's at the expense of breaking what used to work in the past, and it tends to benefit only a subset of users who are within certain usage cases (who work a certain way, who have a large screen, who have a rock-solid high-bandwidth connection, etc.). The trend is for companies to focus only on that limited set of use cases and not on the wider spectrum of customers (for example, road warriors with ultraportables, like me). That's kind of a shame (well, for me, anyway).
Bottom line, for the various reasons stated above, I seem to have would up in the camp of those who see the transition out of classic as "one step forward, two steps back."