You’ve got a new message!

Published by David Vignoni on January 11, 2007 under icons

I was talking about Kmail icons just two posts ago. Well that was already more than 7 months ago (scary!). Anyway, I did a lot of work on Kmail actions, and basically got the final version of the icons. Anyway, some of them may change a little in next months. Some will need to be opimized as action icons (like “print” and “save”) and other may have some beautification improvement (like “delete”).

Action icons have been optimized to look just perfect at 32×32 pixel (the big size) and 22×22 (the small size). In order to do that I had to do 2 different icons, but I’ll talk about that on another post. Ah, if it was 24×24 instead of 22×22 it would be easier. But let’s have a look to the screenshots: Below you can see how default toolbar (on Kubuntu) looks with the new icons:

Kmail default toolbar at 22x22 I don’t use the mail preview pane, so I don’t need on the main toolbar none of the following icons: “print”, “save”, “next and previous unread message”. Those would make more sense on the single message window for me. I think the “File” menu is more than enough for those.

Kmail reply and compose toolbar at 22x22 Below there you can see the inbox and outbox folder. I used a 64×64 SVG document in order to get a perfect looking 16×16:

Detail of inbox and outbox icons.

Some thoughts:

I don’t use the mail preview pane, so I don’t need all these icon on the main toolbar. I specially don’t need “print”, “save”, “next and previous unread message”. “File” menu is more than enough for those.

I was also thinking if we could get rid of the “search” action by implementing all-inclusive search bar without the need of an extra dialog window (and so no need to an icon on the toolbar).Activating the text under icon toolbar view, I saw that in Kmail, and probably in many other KDE applications, the action label looks more like a full description of the action. That’s make the “text under icons” view useless, since nobody would keep a toolbar that look like that:Screenshot of Kmail toolbar with text under icons activated

Because of the long labels, a very useful feature (specially when you want new users to get used soon to a new environment) bacame useless.Here there are some proposal for shorter labels:

  • New message could be write or compose
  • Save as could be just save
  • Check mail in could be just Check or Get
  • Previous/Next unread message should be just Previous/Next
  • Move To Trash could be Delete or Trash

If the label were short I think that “text under icons” toolbar should be set as default.

Seems that’s longest post ever from me!