The ToolBar

The ToolBar is a block that is associated with the DetailView, because it also operates on the selection in the SummaryView.

The ToolBar has a set of buttons that deal with processing whole items. Many of the buttons do thing I associate with emails, e.g. reply, forward, Junk, Send. Some of the buttons are more general; The Fonts button brings up a palette of fonts and styles to facilitate font and style changes in the body of one of the other component blocks. Each button has an iconic representation with a text caption below. These buttons fall into several categories depending on how many states they have, etc.

• Single-action buttons: Reply, ReplyAll, Forward, Delete, Fonts, and Sync, just show themselves enabled or disabled. When you press the button, it fires off its action.
• Toggle-action buttons show themselves in one of two different views, with a different image and caption for each view. Send, Junk and Draft are Toggle-action buttons.
  • Junk switches from "Junk" to "Not Junk" based on whether the Junk attribute is set on the item. Pressing a Toggle-action button changes the attribute, and redraws the button. Note that the button does not show the value of the attribute, but what the attribute will become when you press it: The Junk button displays Junk for emails which are not junk.
  • Draft operates in a similar fashion.
  • Send toggles between a "heads" icon with the caption "Share", and an arrow icon with the caption "Don't Share". Pressing "Share" shows the FromAndToArea of the DetailView. Pressing "Share" also enables the Reply, ReplyAll, and Forward buttons. Pressing "Don't Share" hides the FromAndToArea, and disables the sending buttons.

It's unclear where the ToolBar appears in the UI, so it may not be resizable. If it is, here's how it should behave: When the ToolBar is resized horizonally, space is added between each item to keep the spacing proportional. The ToolBar has a minimum size determined by what's needed to show all its items. The ToolBar has a fixed vertical height.

Questions:

• Did I get the Share/Send button right?
• I don't understand the Sync button, so I'm not going to implement it yet. Maybe it synchronizes "shared" items. With whom are they shared?
• What does the Draft button do? The UIDesign says it does a save-as-draft. Does this just set a bit in the attribute? Does it save the item first? I would think changes would already be saved in the repository.

-- DonnDenman - 24 May 2004