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[enhancement] optionally view address book contacts as photo gallery (TB bug #1456645) #247

Closed chrizilla closed 7 months ago

chrizilla commented 7 months ago

enhancement idea 💡:

view address book contacts as photo gallery This is a nice feature of modern email clients, but regretfully missing in Thunderbird.

rationale for adoption in Betterbird:

With such a killer feature, a huge amount of users would migrate from Thunderbird to Betterbird!

previous requests:

conceptual screenshot:

photo gallery (conceptual screenshot)

Betterbird commented 7 months ago

view address book contacts as photo gallery

This request is a little over-zealous. At best, we would supply an AB "photo gallery" view. A gallery would be fun if you had less than - say - 50 contacts, otherwise you'd be spending a lot of time with scrolling.

Under the assumption that most users will have more than 50 contacts and that they don't necessarily maintain the AB to include photos, this feature would not receive a lot of usage. Besides, TB and BB's target audience is not the group of under 26 y/o, which would have such a nice gallery. Do you think you would have pictures for your lawyer, tax agent, landlord, doctor, ... or the plumber (maybe a big wrench)?

BB is a soft fork of TB, that means, that we need to maintain a set of patches, currently about 200 of them, to turn TB into BB at every version we release. We try to keep the footprint of the patches as small as possible, focussing on functional improvements and bug fixes rather than UI changes or changes that require new strings (and hence translations).

I can't see this being implemented, unless of course the TB folks implement it one day.

chrizilla commented 7 months ago

That's very sad. 😢

But I am a bit confused. You close this as "not planned", but say:

At best, we would supply an AB "photo gallery" view.

That exactly matches my request, no ?

A gallery would be fun if you had less than - say - 50 contacts, otherwise you'd be spending a lot of time with scrolling.

The more contacts you have, the more a gallery view is helpful to keep an overview of who-is-who.

Under the assumption that most users will have more than 50 contacts and that they don't necessarily maintain the AB to include photos, this feature would not receive a lot of usage.

I completely disagree. I think you are completely misjudging user behaviour.

Betterbird commented 7 months ago

Well, we don't have data on user behaviour, so we need to use second guessing.

It's unlikely that someone will scroll through 100+ or 1000+ (mostly non-populated) pictures to find someone. The likeliest access is via text search.

In a survey we conducted in early 2023, nothing related to photos or AB was requested.

chrizilla commented 7 months ago

It's unlikely that someone will scroll through 100+ or 1000+ (mostly non-populated) pictures to find someone. The likeliest access is via text search.

Again, I disagree. Finding someone in a list of 1000+ names takes hours. With pictures a fraction of that.

Anyway, what did you mean by saying:

we would supply an AB "photo gallery" view.

... ?

That was precisely my suggestion.

Betterbird commented 7 months ago

It's not much fun discussing closed tickets (and you're not doing yourself a favour for getting this implemented). The correct quote is: This request is a little over-zealous. At best, we would supply an AB "photo gallery" view.

That refers to the original request: "view address book contacts as photo gallery" without the word "optionally". So your request was precisely to dump the current view and replace it with a photo gallery.

"At best" describes the best possible outcome, however, for reasons given further down in that comment, we decided not to consider this enhancement.

chrizilla commented 7 months ago

@Betterbird : sorry, I was simply trying to understand. Of course it was meant as an additional view, not replacing anything! This is so obvious that I didn't even mention it, but thank you for clarifying that with your title edit.

Ok, I think I understand our conversation now: I guess "we would supply an AB photo gallery view" only meant "we would never replace the existing view" (which I hadn't asked for anyway) but was not meant to say that you would truly consider this request. So the way I read it, this is dead for good, right ?

That's sad. It had a warmer welcome and was greeted as an _"awesome idea"_ at BMO.

Betterbird commented 7 months ago

Oh, yes, they are the perfect spin doctors, "awesome idea", and no action in four years.

Look, TB and BB are open source. Implement it yourself or pay someone to implement it. Submit the patch to TB and get it integrated into TB.

chrizilla commented 7 months ago

Implement it yourself

What language would I have to learn for the photo gallery ?

TB and BB's target audience is not the group of under 26 y/o, which would have such a nice gallery. Do you think you would have pictures for your lawyer, tax agent, landlord, doctor, ... or the plumber

Since you dismissed my idea as kids' stuff, let me just point out that many major email clients do have some form of gallery implemented for decades, at least in the form of a business card view (not really for kids, right?):

Outlook has a business card view for over 2 decades now. This is how it looked back then:

businesscardview

Other example from Kopano:

kopano-contacts

In case you find this more interesting, here is the BMO enhancement request for a business card view: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226155

Betterbird commented 7 months ago

What language would I have to learn for the photo gallery ?

JavaScript.

You can browse the code here: https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/addrbook

The TB beginners guide is here: https://developer.thunderbird.net/thunderbird-development/getting-started

chrizilla commented 7 months ago

thank you! I will look into it.

chrizilla commented 7 months ago

So I guess the business cards or photo gallery would be created in html (as opposed to XUL in the past) and manipulated with javascript? Basically like a website actually?

Betterbird commented 7 months ago

Yes. There are various aspects to the task: You need to get the addresses from the AB and create a HTML page from them. More difficult is to wire this view into the UI which currently supports list and table layout. You can add your business card layout: image

But hey, the "awesome" cheerleaders @ TB should do the mentoring.

Betterbird commented 7 months ago

Off topic:

With such a killer feature, a huge amount of users would migrate from Thunderbird to Betterbird!

How about "More Layouts" already in BB. Is that also a killer feature? Apparently so, see here.