phlyMail Support Board

[HumbleScholar]

I love this program. I've been looking for a web-based alternative to Outlook for years and I think phlyMail is the closest thing.
One of the things that makes Outlook great is its fantastic usability. The user interface is very intuitive, convenient and streamlined.
phlyMail has a very good potential in that regard, despite the limitations of the web interface.

What I would love to see as enhancements to the pinboard view is this:
1. Quick contact search - the ability to search and select contacts without leaving the pinboard.
2. Automatic update of the Emails window on the pinboard - say every time the background process fetches new mail.
Also it would be great to have Get All Mail button on the pinboard and update the Emails window after it's pressed.
3. The Upcoming Events window in pinboard displays the time remaining and the duration of the events.
At the moment we see the start/end date for each event. That takes a lot of processing before you're able to put the event information into perspective.
To figure out how soon the event is, we need to remember/look up today's date, calculate the difference between today and the start date.
To figure out the duration of the event we need to calculate the difference between the start and the end date/time.
Although not a big problem in itself, the usability of the pinboard screen as a dashboard would be greatly enhanced if instead of the start/end date/time we had a column for Time Remaining and Duration.
So an event in the Upcoming events window would look like this:
| 2 days 4 hours | All Day | Wife's Birthday |
| 3 hours 32 mins | 2 hours | Meeting with client |

These are all easy to implement, small improvements but I believe they will greatly improve the usability of the program.
Thanks for listening,
Alik

[mso]

Thank you very much for your suggestions.

Regarding 1.: What would you like to do with these contacts?

Regarding 2.: Yes, that view should update itself regularly. The same applies to the calendar and tasks of course.

Regarding 3.: Well, that sounds like a great idea. But it should be configurable. I guess, there's a few people out there, who are used to the current layout.

I cannot say, with which version and in which timeframe I can find the resources to implement the features. Points 2 and 3 have landed on the internal To Do List.

[HumbleScholar]

Thanks, Mattheas, I do appreciate your attitude towards my suggestions and I do understand that you cannot just drop everything and do this.
We'll wait for whenever you can make these improvements, of course.
The attached picture depicts how I envisage the implementation of Contact Search in the pinboard.
I use Contacts lookup for the following purposes:
1) to call, fax or SMS the contact - so all phone numbers should be immediately visible in the preview pane
2) to email the contact - the email addresses should be visible in the preview pane. Clicking the email address should bring up the compose email window
3) to go to the contact's website. I use this a lot with my institutional contacts such as banks, etc.
I keep the login info in the Comments field and when I need to do internet banking or some such I search for the contact, copy the user name from the comments and click the website.
It is important that all these fields are visible in the preview pane at the same time so there are no extra clicks or going back and forth between screens.