Random pixels

One of the cool things I like about the upcoming Thunderbird 3.0 is that it’s now really easy to find the phone number to that dude your friend e-mailed you a month ago, or to track down who it was that arranged the Christmas concert your choir attended three years ago. This is thanks to the new search function, called Gloda. I got the opportunity to help out with the design of the UI stuff for this, so I wanted to highlight some parts of the design process.

The filters

The early versions of Gloda put a lot of emphasis on the filters that further let you drill down your results. Actually, it had so much emphasis on them that the poor search results got put away at the bottom of the screen. It was a bit tricky finding them there, witch is unfortunate for a search interface.

The solution was a sidebar that clearly put apart filters and results and we were able to cut down the amount of text used by turning some of the true/false switches into the more human-readable (and space saving) check-boxes. We also merged all the to:s and from:s to just People among other things.

The style for the button widgets in the sidebar was a hard decision to make. While they are clearly different in style from the other buttons used in Thunderbird (and on the rest of the desktop), they also have less of a tendency to take attention away from the more important search results, and in this case, that’s a good thing.

The search box

To begin with, the gloda search box was a separate box from the old filtering box. We thought about dealing with this putting the filter box just above the message header pane, but because this would result in showing fewer headers we settled on a approach where we merged the two search fields into one and in the end. Thinking about it some more, it really makes sense, since it’s just about finding things, regardless how things work under the hood.

Timeline

The timeline allows you to see where in time your messages live and hovering a filter in the sidebar highlight where in time that filter applies. We initially discussed showing this in the sidebar, but due to the horizontal space constrains there, we decided to put it in the search results pane. The timeline is hidden by default so it won’t get in the way of the search results.

Looking ahead
There is still lots of improvements that can be made and it would be great to hear how the new search works for you, your friends and relatives.

Get Beta4 or grab the upcoming RC1 when it comes out and try it out!

To all hackers and freedom lovers of Gothenburg:
We’re going to celebrate Software Freedom Day on Saturday.
We’ll meet at Linneplatsen at 15.00. Bring drinkable and eatable things. Depending on the weather, we’re either going to head to Slottsskogen or Gnutiken.

Had a great meeting with the rest of the GNOME Art Team at GCDS!
Together we came up with some points on where we would like to take GNOME visually in the coming 9 months.
One of the things we all agreed on is that a new widget theme is not going to be enough to create a visually stunning desktop.

Fewer but better

At the same time as we’re introducing massive 256×256 icons for places that require 64×64 and up, we also want to take the opportunity to cut down a bit on the massive amount of icons currently used in menus. At the same time, we also want to introduce some guidelines on when to properly use them to enrich your interfaces.
The current approach is that some items have them, and some don’t, and this is because no artist had time to draw it, or because the action is too complex to convey in a small icon, or both. And hand to heart, that’s not a really good guideline.

Getting rid of things (or changing defaults for that matter) is always tricky, as the initial reaction from people used to the old behavior is that nothing of value gets added. However, we believe this is a visually more attractive default and that it will result in a cleaner and more efficient interface (and you can always change it back).

What are the exceptions?
A menu item shall have a icon if it represents a dynamic object such as a:

• Application
• File or bookmark
• Device

How do I make sure the exceptions show in the menus?
Just patch your application to use gtk-image-menu-item-set-always-show-image

Won’t this slow me down, as icons are so quick to spot?
While it’s true that the eye recognize color very quickly, having both text and image also means more information for the brain to process. It’s also worth to note that text skimming speed for adults is around 400-700 wpm.

Ever wish you had your own UI-lab, but can’t build one with all the expensive cameras, big boxes and one-way-mirrors in your house right now?

Pongo 0.1 (requires python and istanbul)

It catches sound and video from your web cam, records your desktop and merges it together into a ogg file that’s ready to publish on the web.
Hope anyone finds it useful. We’re planning on a more proper UI and something that catches the key and mouse presses.
Here is a short screencast (sorry for the colors, don’t hesitate to send fixes if you know what’s wrong)

Big thanks to Daniel and Olivier, who helped me with some initial tests and Jan, who put together the final python code.