{"id":5,"date":"2007-02-18T16:34:30","date_gmt":"2007-02-18T21:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/2007\/02\/18\/fixing-the-evolution-composer\/"},"modified":"2007-02-18T22:28:21","modified_gmt":"2007-02-19T03:28:21","slug":"fixing-the-evolution-composer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/2007\/02\/18\/fixing-the-evolution-composer\/","title":{"rendered":"Fixing the Evolution Composer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back when I worked for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ximian\">Ximian<\/a> a common complaint we heard was that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Novell_Evolution\">Evolution<\/a> wasn&#8217;t good for sending formatted text because it always word wrapped it causing lots of errors.\u00c2\u00a0 This was pretty frustrating because it wasn&#8217;t true, but since we heard it all the time, it was obviously too confusing.\u00c2\u00a0 Here&#8217;s the dialog.\u00c2\u00a0 Can you guess how to preformat text from this screenshot?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/evolution-compose-text.png\" title=\"Evolution Composer\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/evolution-compose-text-thumbnail.png\" alt=\"Evolution Composer\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you guessed that you click on the dropdown that says: &#8220;Normal&#8221; and select &#8220;Preformat,&#8221; you&#8217;re right!<\/p>\n<p>Most people seem to assume that the second toolbar doesn&#8217;t do anything when you&#8217;re not write an HTML mail.\u00c2\u00a0 But that&#8217;s not true.<\/p>\n<p>I recently filed <a href=\"http:\/\/bugzilla.gnome.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=408707\">this<\/a> bug report against the Evolution composer.  The problem is that the composer is too confusing to use.\u00c2\u00a0 Here is the composer editing an HTML message:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/evolution-compose-html.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/evolution-compose-html.png\" alt=\"Evolution Composer HTML Mode\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I propose that the main toolbar lose the &#8220;insert&#8221; capabilities that only work in HTML mode and gain a toggle button which switches between HTML and plain text mode.  When the button is pressed in, you&#8217;re sending an HTML message.The secondary toolbar should only contain the controls that are currently active.  So text color, font size, font decoration, and font style will not be shown in text mode.  And instead of &#8220;normal&#8221; the default mode should be named for what it actually does: &#8220;Word Wrap.&#8221;  Something like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/composer-simple.png\" title=\"Revised Evolution Composer Text Mode\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/composer-simple.png\" alt=\"Revised Evolution Composer Text Mode\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>With this scheme, HTML mode looks like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/composer-html.png\" title=\"Revised Evolution Composer HTML Mode\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/composer-html.png\" alt=\"Revised Evolution Composer HTML Mode\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>See the bug for more mockups.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back when I worked for Ximian a common complaint we heard was that Evolution wasn&#8217;t good for sending formatted text because it always word wrapped it causing lots of errors.\u00c2\u00a0 This was pretty frustrating because it wasn&#8217;t true, but since we heard it all the time, it was obviously too confusing.\u00c2\u00a0 Here&#8217;s the dialog.\u00c2\u00a0 Can\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/2007\/02\/18\/fixing-the-evolution-composer\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gnome","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xkahn.zoned.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}