Display of recent folders

[mclaborn]

I'm not a fan of the way the recent folders are displayed in TB 115.

1. The only icon that is intuitive to me is the folder icon. I assume that the closed blue envelope is "account". I get "inbox" but having a separate icon for "folder" vs "inbox" is visually confusing to me.

2. Rather than having a separate line for the account, how about showing the account on the right side as part of the folder hierarchy? Would save space and for me would be more intuitive. Alternatively, maybe a tree view?

All that said, I still love this add-on. It is the first thing that I got working again when TB decided to update itself to 115.

[kewisch]

The icons are those from Thunderbird for consistency. There is a compact view coming in version 2.6 which is yet to be released, but you can try it out in #88. In that version, the current account is also displayed up top and I imagine in most cases folks will want to move into another folder of the same account.

Making them right side as part of the path seems interesting, though one of the advantages of showing the account headings is making it harder to accidentally move into the wrong account.

I'm happy to experiment with ways to improve the display, though I'm fairly happy with what we have now. Having some UI mockups might help us iterate on this together, do you happen to have some design experience and could provide some mockups?

[mclaborn]

2.6.3 doesn't work for me at all. The search bar is missing. Unless you have some ideas, I'll have to go back to 2.0.1.

What format of file for UI mockups? Will HTML with embedded CSS work?

[mclaborn]

2.6.4 fixed the problems I was having.
I definitely like the compact view much more than the wide view.
If you are still interested in collaborating on design mock ups, answer the file format question above.

[kewisch]

Sweet! Just sharing a few screenshots should do. If you clone the repo you can probably replicate the popup in the browser with some mock data in place of the browser.* calls.

[mclaborn]

Attached are some ideas. Let me know if you want the HTML source. I used the gray background only to make the folder icon show up better. I like the white currently used.

In all of these, I would like to see the list in order by the folder name. (That's how I look for them, not by account.)

wide1.png adds account name on the right in bold.

compact1.png shows the hierarchy in reverse order so that the folder name is first on the line, making the folder name easier to spot. This is my favorite.

compact2.png hierarchy in normal order. Might want this one in account name order.

wide1.png

compact1.png

compact2.png

[kewisch]

compact1 is my favorite of those as well. It shouldn't be too hard to implement, an option for this in the preferences, don't show the account nodes if enabled, a new getter on the foldernode that gives the full parts including the account, then join using the arrow.

I'll leave this information with you in case you'd like to try a pull request, otherwise I'll see if I can get to this :)

[mclaborn]

I'm willing to give it a try. I'm reasonably proficient in Javascript and HTML, but I've never used Git Hub or pull requests so that will be something I have to figure out.
I'd need help on how to build the source into a testable .zip.

[kewisch]

Super! In development you don't actually have to build, you can use the unpacked sources directly. Navigate to Tools > Developer Tools > Debug Add-ons, then click "Load temporary add-on", then select the manifest.json in the sources. When you've made changes, hit reload. HTML changes may potentially work without a reload. You won't find this in the hamburger menu, you'll have to press Alt to get into the menubar on Windows (and I believe also Linux)

If you do want to build a .zip, you can do npm install; npm run build which will produce a package in the web-ext-artifacts subdirectory.

[mclaborn]

Did you get my PR? No rush, just wanted to make sure that I did it correctly.

[kewisch]

Thanks for the reminder! Apologies I haven't gotten back, preparing for a big event in Riga at work so my free time is somewhat limited. I'll try to get to this on the weekend or an evening :)