Hello!
I just had to reinstall (or at least move) Roundcube, so I took a look on the progress in the last months. I just discovered the new theme “larry”. Wonderful work!
It is in many aspects a nice improvement. Icons are more standardized. The color scheme is … personally I hope it will be changed (it’s not a nice blue), but that is a matter of taste.
But what is a bad issue and really needs to be improved: the
huge waste of screen space!
I compared with the default theme and with my compact default theme (where the two top bars have been merged, the margin narrowed). The latter only needs 63 pixels height from top to the first message in list. “larry” needs 158 (default theme: 108). The icons in the second task bar are nice but way too big. And where is the use for so much free space above/below? I personally don’t see why I should waste 50 or more pixels for nothing.
Secondly, the margins at the bottom are also too big. There is a full 30 pixel high line only for displaying some status messages
sometime. Why don’t you just make an overlay like before? It could also be on the bottom (that is what I did in my custom default theme).
All in all it’s no good design to cramp everything as tight as it gets together. But wasting huge vertical spaces (monitors are more wide than high!) without need is also bad. It’s quite the same thing Google did … some kind of current fashion I guess? Design should not be prioritized. Function should.
So, before I can use this theme I have to strike out some unneccessary spaces … because I want to use the extra features.
The text here is just to show that it won’t be good all in all. I think there is still time for changes and just want to say what’s good and what’s bad.