Two nice modal dialog improvements to Thunderbird in two days
April 9th, 2010 Posted in Mozilla, ThunderbirdIn the last couple of days, we’ve had a couple of fixes to long-standing bugs land in time for Thunderbird 3.1 (and they’ll be in beta 2 when it comes out). I’m calling these out as they are fixes that I like and I hope will improve the flow for a lot of users.
Connection Issues
First up, your server goes offline for a bit, or your connection is dodgy, Thunderbird can’t contact the server, so what did it do? Thunderbird used to stick up a modal dialog and not let you do anything until you’d acknowledged it:
Now it’ll give you a nice little alert:
On Mac, Thunderbird is integrated with Growl if you’ve got it installed, and that’s the growl alert in the picture above.
If you miss the alert, it’ll also log it in the activity manager (accessible from the Tools menu) so you can look at it later. There’s a few notifications for protocol errors that will be displayed in this manner, but I haven’t looked up the full list.
Thanks to timeless for providing the idea and initial work for the patch on that bug.
Return Receipts
Next up, return receipts. If you’d configured it to ask whether or not to return a receipt, Thunderbird would stick up a modal dialog before or whilst displaying the message and you wouldn’t be able to read the message before making your decision:
Well, Michiel did some work for us and now we’ve got a nice new notification bar instead of the modal dialog:
So I’d like to say thanks to timeless and Michiel for doing those patches and making Thunderbird’s workflow that little bit better.
8 Responses to “Two nice modal dialog improvements to Thunderbird in two days”
By Jesper Kristensen on Apr 9, 2010
One thing I think would be nicer in the connection issues case would be a status indication instead of an alert. Some kind of UI element, which does not go away until a successful communication is made with the server later on. It is nice to know when you have lost your connection, but is it also nice to know when it comes back again, so you can continue working.
By Standard8 on Apr 9, 2010
@Jesper: It is entirely possibly that we’ll turn it into some kind of status indication in future – indeed it has been discussed before. For 3.1 this is a big improvement in work flow (not getting interrupted) which is why we’ve taken it, as its a nice simple fix.
You might want to stick your idea on http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/ as we’re collecting and discussing ideas there and getting further feedback.
By Dao on Apr 10, 2010
The connectivity alert was extraordinarily annoying to me, as one of my e-mail accounts isn’t even expected to work most of the time. (And I couldn’t find a way to disable it temporarily.) Every time I hit Ctrl+Shift+T, the modal dialog would pop up. I’m glad it’s fixed.
By James John Malcolm on Apr 10, 2010
I’m so glad it’s fixed too. Thank you all very much!
By zorba on Apr 10, 2010
This is great and works well (I just tested). One glitch though: I’m using Growl.
When I receive a new mail, the notification has a title (the account name from which it retrieved the mail), then the message (“x new mails from …”).
For the “Failed to connect to server…” there isn’t a title. One should be provided. Either a default like “Thunderbird” or “Shredder”, either a more descriptive one “Shredder could not retrieve mail from…” with the same sentence as the cause.
Another improvement possible with Growl is to create two new kinds of notification when registering Shredder with Growl: “Transient notifications”, like this one (if I miss it, it is not important, I’ll see the next one: I will not configure Growl to stick on screen) and “Updates” (which I’ll likely make it stick). Currently there is only “General notification” and “New mail”.
It would be perfect!