Tiger Mail - folders on the right??
 

Greetings, all.

I hope this is as simple as tweaking a NIB, but I haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Tiger's Mail is unusable to me because of the unnatural layout, with folders on the left. Surely one can tweak a NIB resource file to get folders on the right, but so far I have crashed Mail with every attempt at changing this.

However, I'm an Interface Builder newbie; any chance one of you knows how to do this?

Thanks.

Eagle

I wouldn't say unnatural. Microsoft Entourage has email folders on the left. Every version of Netscape I know of has folders on the left. Claris Emailer? on the left.

If you were joking and I didn't get it that's OK. People are already starting to mess with the interface of the new mail.

http://otierney.net/cagefighter/

And I have read other requests like yours. Perhaps someone will come up with a way.

I'm with you, eagle. I can't stand the mailboxes being on the left. I've been using them on the right for the last 4 years, I don't see why I can't continue this. Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to fix this (yet).

I wasn't joking. There's a reason I wouldn't use a graphical mail program before OS X Mail (other than NeXT Mail, but I repeat myself), and that is because it is unnatural to me to have the folders on the left.

Seriously.

OS X Mail was the first mail client good enough for me to switch from... are you ready? ... elm. Yes, elm. I used elm for over a decade and only switched for OS X Mail.

Curious, are you guys left handed? Either of you originally read a language that is written right-to-left?

No, I'm right-handed and I am a native English speaker.

To me, the process (read mail, file mail) naturallly flows left-to-right, not right-to-left (find folder, find mail to put in folder).

No, neither.

Most applications by default open with their windows starting in the upper left hand corner. I think since I spend more time looking at emails then mailboxes, I just wanted them out of the way on the right.

Funny, I look at the process as select folder, read mail in folder, which is left-to-right also. I rarely file mail but for me "back to folders" is very logical when I do.

I am mostly ambidextrous and my dad is a Southpaw, maybe that's it.

I'm with yellow and eagle on this one.

I think it's to do with the similarity to reading a book. You read what's on the page in front of you, and then reach to the right to see the next page. It feels natural to view Mail.app's display as a folder with those coloured dividers (mailboxes) down the right hand edge.

But look on the bright side - no more *&&$^%£%^&$%&@ drawers.

I also vote for mailboxes on the right. I also have my dock on the right. Every program on earth puts its tool palettes on the right (at least be default). You scroll on the right (except in xterm), and you do everything else on the left.

That said, a linux/Win switcher I know puts his dock on the left (horrors).

I'd to support this opinion. (I'm native German, though)

Someone who knows how to use Interface Builder better than me will have to find the solution, but it looks like the right NIB file is located in Mail --> Resources --> English.lproj --> MessageViewer.nib.

If someone can provide instructions on how to switch the two view panes, I think we'd be in business.

another vote for boxes on the right.... I have already blown away several hours searching for a solution. Almost ALL of my clients have asked about this. I dismissed netscape mail early on because of this...

i'll put my vote in for on the left, since it (the choice of 'on the left') is feeling pretty lonely right now :)

Effective now, that is an unqualified 'ALL'....

There's not going to be a consistent cultural precedent for this.

In my mind, left > right = general > specific, according to the model followed by:
IP addresses - XXX.XXX.XX.XX
phone numbers - country code, area code, local
disk navigation - computer, volume, folder, file
Apple Mail - mailbox, folder, message

On the other hand, the opposition can come up with a popular counter-example in the form of postal addresses, which for some odd reason go specific > general:
Person
Address
City, State, Country

Apple's ultimate solution would be to provide an option for mailboxes on the right, but this is probably, and rightly, pretty far down on the list of priorities for Apple to fix given the general disarray of the Finder, the inability to resize windows by anything other than the lower right corner, etc.

It's the same unfortunate inconsistency that dogs "consumer friendly" numeric keypads. Do you implement the layout of calculators (descending order) or of telephones (ascending order).

right vs left
 

I agree with the sentiment for th mailboxes on the right,....it's not so much a cultural thing or left handed-ness as a user interface thing,...The scroll bars are on the right, all the stuff on my desktop is on the right (set to stay in alpha order), dock is on the right,...that allows my documents and windows to be on the left. Navigating around documents via the scroll bar, or using tool pallettes that are moveable are on the right near the scroll bars,....mail's mailboxes on the right would fit that model,...obviously just a preference,..but it would be nice if one didn't lose options as software reved to a newer incarnation!

Might be nice then to add,...for some users,...allow you to choose to put the vertical scroll bar on the left or the horizontal on the top rather than bottom,...

Well I successfully edited the message view to make it display the mailboxes on the right, only it creates a new messageviewer.nib file called messageviewer~.nib with the original settings in! And if I then change that one, it creates messageviewer~~.nib.

Now I'm trying to delve into the pref files and .strings files to see if I can find where it mentions the messageviewer.nib file and checks it.

That is normal - it is just an automatically created backup in case you decide you don't like your changes. Those files with ~ are ignored by the application.

Could you please be a bit more explicit about how you did it?

thx

Mail still shows the mailboxes on the left, even though I have changed it in Interface Builder.

I am drunk, will tell you tommorrow.

changing the nibs are a pain in the ass. there might be another element in the nib that needs to be changed that you missed. i found this out as i unsuccessfully tried to make the messages all go from left to right, not top to bottom.

Yup, the nibs are a big pain the the ass. I copied the attributes from one side to the other in the nib file. Then open mail and it still looks the same!

Talk about annoying.

Funny, I went to Google searching for "tiger mail folders right" and found this thread instantly as the first result.

I had hoped that my search would instead result in a "here's what you have to do to fix it, since it's not intuitively obvious" but it's beginning to look like designed it this way. I just can't believe it.

Did they think that at least some users would be extremely irritated by the inability to put folders on the right? Forget who wants them there and why; this is just bizarre to me. It's the kind of thing that beta testing and user testing is supposed to reveal as a horrible design change.

Oh well... hopefully someone will come up with a fix, or maybe Apple will rectify the mistake with an updated build delivered over Software Update soon. Please?