I really don't understand this. It already looks a little too clumped to me, what's the benefit to further putting things closer to one another? It's not like you're doing some kind of additive transformation and you need to quickly jump between lines, each email is its own thing and you can only read one at a time. If you need to find specific ones you can always categorize them or use the search functionality. I'm just confused by statements like this.
Being able to quickly scan a large list of emails without scrolling is practical and useful. All whitespace achieves is aesthetics, which are meaningless beyond initial adoption.
My work email rarely exist in a vacuum, they exist in the context of all my other work emails.
The ability to actually cross reference and get work done quickly should always trump aesthetics. These modern “spaced out” UIs are infuriating, they achieve nothing other than requiring more scrolling.
> Being able to quickly scan a large list of emails without scrolling is practical and useful.
Conversely, why is scrolling considered evil? We can agree that emails are documents. In real life, on your desk, do spread out all your documents so you could see them all at once? Or do you have a stack of them and view them one by one? You can still cross reference by putting documents side by side, just like you can with multiple emails open in separate windows or monitors.
Admittedly depending on the amount of emails and the speed at which you work through them you might benefit from seeing many at once, though there's other ways of dealing with that issue.
> All whitespace achieves is aesthetics, which are meaningless beyond initial adoption.
I don't think whitespace is all about aesthetics. Personally, it makes it easier for me to read and focus on things. It gives individual things more value, rather than them being "just another thing in a gigantic list", easily blending in and showing no significance.
> Conversely, why is scrolling considered evil? We can agree that emails are documents. In real life, on your desk, do spread out all your documents so you could see them all at once? Or do you have a stack of them and view them one by one? You can still cross reference by putting documents side by side, just like you can with multiple emails open in separate windows or monitors.
Do you inspect your store's inventory by having one page per SKU or do you get a listing with each SKU summarised into its title?
I think the distinction here is really that some people (myself included) deal with so much email, that they need tools to deal with it in bulk, and others in this thread apparently do not. Maybe they're dealing with emails one by one as they come in, maybe they just don't get that much email.
Spacing is useful for me because it helps each individual piece of text stand out from the others. Too dense and it all looks like a jumble to me that I can't easily scan visually. Too much whitespace I agree is bad for the reasons you described. But everyone has different taste here. The ideal scenario is an option to change spacing.
Apps that have too much space don't always work right when you "snap" them to 1/2 or 1/4 of the screen (sometimes the navigation components take up the entire window and the content section becomes unusably small)
You can see entire subject lines when performing bulk operations like archiving email where you want to keep some that are still relevant in the inbox?
each email is its own thing and you can only read one at a time
That's not true. Majority of my interaction with inbox is scanning through dozens of automated e-mail notifications and spam in search of the one I'm interested in. Most of the messages gets deleted or marked as read without ever being opened. And no, you cannot solve this with filtering, there's just too many edge cases.
The way I use Thunderbird is I have the top section on the email list and use the arrows to quickly jump to the next email and read it from the preview window on the bottom half of the screen. Since my screen is only so big the denser display suits this better. I do like to be able to see all the emails I have to get through on one screen.
Either way it's just my personal preference there's no need to understand it.
