I've been having some issues visualizing things, so I threw this UI mockup together. Please bear with the roughness, since I don't do this much (at all).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dssstrkl/4301490713/ The idea is to have the whole window be navigable through the arrow keys, just like NNW. So you start at the Inbox, arrow over to your messages, then arrow again to open the message. I like the way that Gmail (the webapp) has the Reply, Archive, etc buttons above and below the message itself, but I'm not sure how Mac-like that is. My reasoning is that the widgets for performing an action should be as close to the thing being acted upon as possible, rather than have to go to the toolbar for everything. I just grabbed the tabbar from Chrome and pasted it in. I really think that tabs should be included, but what I did there was pretty ugly. I don't know if tabs on top or tabs on bottom of the toolbar is best. Also, I think that the best way to handle threading would be to include it directly on top of the message that has focus. That way, if one wants to expand the thread, focus would still be kept. I don't know if the middle pane should be kept in thread or message view, but I'm sure most people would be happy with a preference. Finally, I didn't show this, but I think that replies should be in the third pane, underneath the thread. I don't care for Mail's way of opening a new compose window. As for new messages, I would still keep the composer in the third pane, but keep focus on the first and second panes where they were. That way, you can stay where you are in your workflow and still be able to fire off rapid messages. Paul Ward [email protected] _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list List help: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/email-init-ranchero.com
