New OX 7.10 UI shortcomings are annoying

[nberglmeir]

The new annoyances maybe small for some, but to us they’re completely illogical.
First thing you learn is that if you invent one more click for the user, he’s angry because
you’re making his work harder. So here we are now.

Why do we have to click on a menu first to open the shortcuts we need ALL THE TIME.
And why only 3 Quicklinks? Please the the user decide how many quicklinks he want’s
or even better just move the quicklinks to menu IF the browserwidth is too small for all icons.

Now there’s an almost empty menubar with only 3 icons which makes no practical sense at all.
I mean where’s the “clutter” in having 6 or 7 icons on a full hd monitor. It does NOT come handy.

Quickreply: Probably the most used answering method. Everyone loved it and it should have been
further enhanced. For example by showing all quick replies in a conversation/chat like way.

The popup reply windows are fine and good, but they have nothing to do with the quick replay and
they’re certainly not a replacement. Because with quick reply I had no signature and I could prevent
the monstrous mails with all the replies and the reply to replies.

Now we’re back where we’ve started. If you don’t want a signature for “quick replying” you have
to remove the signature first. Which of course the other team member doesn’t and here
we go again with emails that are too long, existing mostly of signatures.

So please OX, consider the quick reply not as obsolete because you could replace them, because
you didn’t. You took away a really good feature. Click in the text, write, fire. That was so simple and
made life so much easier when working in teams.

[nberglmeir]

Seriously no reply on this?

[Wolfgang Rosenauer]

Not many people can reply on that topic. And those probably do not read the forum.
In case you are using the product through a service provider you might want to make sure to give this feedback to them. Or if you are a customer you could open a support ticket with your feedback.

[nickbe]

Hi Wolfgang,

sorry to hear that. So why does this forum exist then? Isn't this the way to get feedback for you?

Do you really need a ticket to honour an opinion from an everyday ox user who has to explain these flaws to his own customers whom he also brought into the ox world. We are obviously not valuable clients for you because we are probably too small, but rest asured we are successful in our own rights.

Not many people can reply on that topic. And those probably do not read the forum.
In case you are using the product through a service provider you might want to make sure to give this feedback to them. Or if you are a customer you could open a support ticket with your feedback.

[pro-ite]

Hi,
pro-ite is a partner and OX hoster. Many new fine features are included in 7.10 But feedback of our customers and we agree in

....
Now there’s an almost empty menubar with only 3 icons which makes no practical sense at all.
I mean where’s the “clutter” in having 6 or 7 icons on a full hd monitor. It does NOT come handy.

Customer replys are like: How can this be an enhancement if OX is used seriously as a everyday tool ?
Customers first question was: forced limit with only 3 favorite menue items - how can we enlarge this on the server?

Quickreply: Probably the most used answering method. Everyone loved it and it should have been
further enhanced. For example by showing all quick replies in a conversation/chat like way.
...

So please OX, consider the quick reply not as obsolete because you could replace them, because
you didn’t. You took away a really good feature. Click in the text, write, fire. That was so simple and
made life so much easier when working in teams.

Customers miss the mail quick reply: the reply feature changed and is enhanced on portal view.

[nickbe]

Thanks a lot for confirming that we are not alone in this

[tafkaz]

Thanks a lot for confirming that we are not alone in this

Hi Nick, Ursula and Wolfgang.
God knows, you're not alone with this...
Annoying to the bone really.
Will try to put this on the table here and there at OX Summit...:-)

Cheers
Sascha

[Wolfgang Rosenauer]

Hi Wolfgang,

sorry to hear that. So why does this forum exist then? Isn't this the way to get feedback for you?

Do you really need a ticket to honour an opinion from an everyday ox user who has to explain these flaws to his own customers whom he also brought into the ox world. We are obviously not valuable clients for you because we are probably too small, but rest asured we are successful in our own rights.

It is one way to get feedback to us. It's also one way to ask for help in case the software is used without our commercial support. It's also a way to meet other users, developers etc. which are probably not associated with OX directly.
I also forwarded your feedback internally. So it's noted by Product Management.

[nickbe]

Hi Wolfgang,

thanks for taking this to the product management people. Knowing that you're open for these kind of annoying complaints (well, all complaints are annoying in some way , really helps.

[homi]

One more in the boat who has to deal with angry users now due to the same design issues mentioned above.

@ox: Please consider to introduce such major design changes as new switch-able (opt-in) theme or at least allow us admins to use the legacy style easily.

To comply with our user requests I started to adjusted the common.css and style.css to to make the interface better suited for desktop users (no negative side-effects for small screen devices observed). Since we use CentOS i configured this as a yum post transaction hook if the packages open-xchange-appsuite (provides common.css) and/or open-xchange-appsuite-manifest (style.css) are updated.

Any other suggestions on how to tweak the interface for Desktops?

## OX 7.10 web-ui tweaks for Desktops

## make the top bar smaller (63px => 40px)
sed -i 's/#io-ox-appcontrol{position:absolute;left:0;right:0;z-index:12;color:#fff;height:63px;border-bottom:1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.9);padding:0;display:flex;align-content:center}/#io-ox-appcontrol{position:absolute;left:0;right:0;z-index:12;color:#fff;height:40px;border-bottom:1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.9);padding:0;display:flex;align-content:center}/g' /var/www/html/appsuite/apps/themes/default/common.css

## move the rest of the interface upwards (from top 63px to top 40px)
sed -i 's/#io-ox-core #io-ox-screens{top:63px}/#io-ox-core #io-ox-screens{top:40px}/g' /var/www/html/appsuite/apps/themes/default/common.css
sed -i 's/position:absolute;left:0;right:0;z-index:-1;height:63px;border-bottom:1px/position:absolute;left:0;right:0;z-index:-1;height:40px;border-bottom:1px/g' /var/www/html/appsuite/apps/themes/default/common.css

## fix the hamburger button height (from 63px to 40px) 
sed -i 's/#io-ox-appcontrol #io-ox-launcher>button,#io-ox-appcontrol #io-ox-quicklaunch>button{font-size:18px;color:#fff;padding:2px 16px 0;width:48px;margin-top:-2px;position:relative;z-index:2;height:63px;display:inline-block;border:0}/#io-ox-appcontrol #io-ox-launcher>button,#io-ox-appcontrol #io-ox-quicklaunch>button{font-size:18px;color:#fff;padding:2px 16px 0;width:48px;margin-top:-2px;position:relative;z-index:2;height:40px;display:inline-block;border:0}/g' /var/www/html/appsuite/apps/themes/default/common.css

## make logo fit the new topbar size (width 60px to width 40px)
sed -i 's/#io-ox-top-logo img{width:60px;max-height:100%;margin-top:-1px}/#io-ox-top-logo img{width:40px;max-height:100%;margin-top:-1px}/g' /var/www/html/appsuite/apps/themes/default/common.css
sed -i 's/#io-ox-top-logo{list-style:none;font-size:0;line-height:63px}/#io-ox-top-logo{list-style:none;font-size:0;line-height:40px}/g' /var/www/html/appsuite/apps/themes/default/common.css

## make the mail tree not waste so much space (height 32px to height 16px)
sed -i 's/.mail-item .text-preview.multiline{font-size:13px;line-height:16px;height:32px;-webkit-line-clamp:2;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;white-space:normal;display:none}/.mail-item .text-preview.multiline{font-size:13px;line-height:16px;height:0px;-webkit-line-clamp:2;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;white-space:normal;display:none}/g' /var/www/html/appsuite/apps/themes/default/io.ox/mail/style.css

[Wolfgang Rosenauer]

Just a quick question about the last one about the mail grid height:
Why did you need it? By default 7.10 is enabling "text preview" which uses this space (but only if your IMAP server returns content for that). This can be turned off by the user or via pre configuration of a UI setting.
For the topbar stuff I fully understand the reasoning but for the mail grid height I think this is the wrong approach (unless I do not understand your original concern).

[homi]

Why did you need it? By default 7.10 is enabling "text preview" which uses this space

We run the default dovecot release shipped with RHEL-6 (with some custom plugins like nfs filesystem quotas provided by netapp filer), so the 'text preview' function does not work and leaves a lot of white space for us.

This can be turned off by the user or via pre configuration of a UI setting

Ah, i did not see this setting. Thanks. I will check it out and disable it globally.

[markus]

Now there’s an almost empty menubar with only 3 icons which makes no practical sense at all.
I mean where’s the “clutter” in having 6 or 7 icons on a full hd monitor. It does NOT come handy.

So, mailbox.org released OX 7.10 and they managed to show 12 icons in the quick launch bar. Is it possible for all newer open xchange installations? How can we allow more than 3 shortcuts?

[Wolfgang Rosenauer]

This is a programmatical change which requires a UI plugin.

Also honestly the quick launch bar at mailbox.org is probably what our PM wanted to avoid by not making this possible. This is too much clutter even for me.