In case you wonder what I’ve done this week, I will show you some screenshots of the progress of Mailody this week.
One important thing preventing me to switch Mailody4 was the fact that I could not use attachments yet. In KDE3 times we used KFileIconView to display the attached attachments in the composer. After a rename to K3FileIconView, in the end it needed to be removed from the KDE repository, so I had to comment out the functionality in Mailody. To refresh your mind, this is how it looked in Mailody3:
[img_assist|nid=195|title=|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=514|height=93]
I requested on IRC what I could use to let it look the same and some advised me to use a QListView with a Flow LeftToRight. I tried that, and after an evening fiddling with settings and adding the needed context menu (open / delete) and hooking it into the composer, it resulted in:
[img_assist|nid=196|title=|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=529|height=70]
It’s almost the same, so the average user will not see the difference, but still it was a couple of hours work. But as it is a proper Model/View, there is now the option to make it all different without much work in the future. I like the column based layout from the old one more then the fuzzy positioning of the new one, but for now this will do. At this stage I’m not prepared to spent hours on it, if I’m even capable of doing that ;-)
The next point was that the pulldown menu’s for the identity and mailtransport selection was taking up too much screen estate in the composer. So I made those comboboxes optional. But then you don’t have any indication about which identity is being used and you can not change it easily. And then I saw an empty StatusBar ;-). So I added it to the statusbar and made it clickable to be able to switch to another identity or mailtransport. And best of all, it’s close to the ’send’ button of the composer, so it’s natural as well. Here is how it looks:
[img_assist|nid=197|title=|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=179|height=153]
I know clicking on statusbar items is not really intuitive, but we also have it when viewing messages in the mainwindow, so Mailody users might be familiar. Also that doesn’t hide functionality, as the combo boxes are still available. I also know it does not look as slick as the usual Plasma widget, but then again I’m not born for that, so if anyone wants to pimp Mailody, I’m happy to talk to you. Final remark is that the statusbar does not look like a statusbar anymore, no line above it, slightly smaller font, etc. I’ll just blame the used style. ;-)
The last feature I implemented this week was a long standing feature request from myself and a co-worker. Simply save all incoming attachments in a certain folder. It’s a great feature (first implemented by Eudora afaik), because you don’t have to save the attachments from a mail to a certain folder when you need it, it is simply there in a folder (which you can open with your favorite shortcut). Also you might remember after a few months something about a pdf you have received a couple months back. It’s simply still there in that folder, while you might not find that e-mail back. I know that folder can grow rapidly in size, but harddisks are cheap and it is deactivated by default.
[img_assist|nid=198|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=407|height=84]
The checkbox is really a QGroupBox which is checkable. Anyhow, that was what I did this week. I’m almost ready to start Mailody4 now, it is going to be the best Mailody release ever for me.
