The category list provided in the drop-down list-box when creating a new contact is not sorted on any collation basis. Quick search is not available when trying to select one or more category. Need to improve the overall experience of the category UI. The best place to look for is the category implementation done in MS Outlook.
Hi, I am sorry but we do not plan to alter this behaviour in any way.
Jan
That is not a very matured response. Sorting is a basic feature of any list and if you are telling me that you do not plan to provide sorting of category list then that is a shame since it is such a simple problem to solve and not having this feature affects the user’s ability to use the feature with an acceptable turn-around time. Please reconsider you plan. I have put on hold the purchase decision for now. Please discuss this issue with your technical team. All you have to do is make minor change to the query that produces the result set of Categories and that should be quite straight forward in SQL Lite with an ORDER BY statement.
That is official response from support, we simply can’t implement every feature users wants, then eM Client would become unusable and uncomfortable to use.
Every software has design and developing plan, and it is usually altered only very slightly.
Jan
I also would like to see the categories in the dropdown box sorted.
I don’t think you should change the SQL query for this: most likely you will have build a list of objects in memory representing the categories. Sorting is a user interface related thing, so it’s just enough to sort this list in code (or maybe the dropdown box has a ‘sort field’ property or something like this).
I understand your point that you cannot implement every feature that users ask. But at the same time your application architecture and product team should also understand and prioritize the requests which improve the usability of the software product. Basic feature like “List should be sorted” out to be there in the product out-of-box. I would like call this out as a defect since calling it a feature would be a misnomer. I rely heavily on categories to keep my communications organized.
Believe me you that if you listen to your users they will take to great places. You have a good product now we can together make it a great product. I say this from my personal experience as I Head Software Product Development and it is the collective input of the customers which constantly improved my product.
Hans: I agree that you can achieve the objective the way you have outlined but there could be multiple places in the product where category list is displayed and if this control is not designed properly and there exists multiple instances of the object then every place in the code needs to be provided with the same fix but I believe that there would be a single view written to query the “Category Master” table and if an “ORDER BY CategoryName” clause is added to this view or query all lists will be fixed in one go. I am not saying that the control (dropdown list) should support user controlled sorting. I am saying that the system sorts the list in ascending order following Western-ISO Latin collation sequence.
just installed em client and I was really looking for a outlook alterternative, but not having a sorted list of my categories is a no go!!!
outlook is a little better, but even there is a plugin needed to really get working with categories (categorize plus)
please rethink your category aproach and I`m your next customer.
Any further news on this? Speaking as an amateur user and not as an IT professional, I should have thought that this would be a very simple modification to introduce, and to the benefit of all users. I fail to understand how it could render the software unstable.
Bill