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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-with-ponies dept.

Mozilla is asking for feedback about Thunderbird and threatening a redesign. Thunderbird is the most feature-rich of the GUI mail clients, but as a result also has a lot of cruft. The goal of the survey is to learn what Thunderbird users think about the current design, what are the biggest drawbacks, what potential changes should there be, and so on. The claim is that the information will be considered before any actual changes are made to the program itself.

See also Bryan Lunduke's interview with newly fledged Thunderbird developer Ryan Sypes about future directions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BQugHIccTI

So if you rely on Thunderbird for any part of your work flow, speak up now before it ends up unusable trash like M$ Outlook or Apple Mail.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:00PM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:00PM (#624099) Journal

    We need Chinese walls between mobile and desktop designers, and having touched an iphone EVER disqualifies you from doing desktop UI design.

    I've touched an iPhone and can honestly say that the iOS mail client is the worst that I have ever used. The desktop Apple mail client is a lot better and all of the recent UI regressions have been a result of trying to make it more like the iOS one. This redesign seems to be trying to make Thunderbird look more like the iOS mail client.

    The survey is also pretty annoying. It asks if you think the existing Thunderbird UI is boring, with an implicit assumption that this is a bad thing. It is not. A good UI is boring. It is invisible. If I notice the UI in normal operation of the program, then you are doing something wrong. The purpose of a good UI is to get out of my way and make the things that I want to do easier. Every time I press a button, you should be thinking 'did we really need that to be a button?' If I need to interact with three UI elements to accomplish a task, you should be thinking 'could that be a single UI element?'

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @07:44PM (#624321)

    Does it at least ask whether it needs a hamburger menu?

    And why doesn't this site have a hamburger menu?