
How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail - andre3k1
http://theinvisibl.com/2011/01/24/iphonemail/
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jazzychad
We do the same thing for the Notifo iPhone app, except our "magic number" is
1. If you are the top of the list, new notifications slide in and push the
list down. If you are scrolled down past the first notification, new
notifications load in, but the list stays still (a non-trivial thing to do
with UITableViews). I never knew the mail app did the same thing (I have mine
set to refresh manually); it just seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

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ugh
Twitter’s Mac app does this, too, it also only scrolls if you are not farther
down than one tweet. (Automatic scrolling, which is off by default, has to be
enabled.)

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btrask
Most (probably all) chat clients (IM and IRC) do this too. I think it is more
common than the author gives credit for. It's invisible unless it's missing.

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dansingerman
I think the best UIs are generally full of the "invisible unless it's missing
stuff".

Thats the subtle stuff that is often hard to get right.

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kessler
This is a great breakdown, thanks. Now can you explain why so often I receive
an email on the iPhone and one of two things happens:

1\. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but
when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail
button, the new message downloads and appears.

2\. If I'm in MobileMail.app a new email arrives and I see it up top for a few
seconds, and instantly it disappears. Again, I have to tap refresh to re-
download the message.

Why does this happen?

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liamk
I have the exact same issue - I use gmail and IMAP with iPhone3G.

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2arrs2ells
You should try gmail + ActiveSync push. Made the leap a week ago, and the
whole mail experience feels a lot smoother.

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matty
Beware, it tends to burn up your battery a bit quicker as well.

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_sh
I don't have an iPhone, but I do have a question...

What if you've sorted the list (by sender, for example) so the 'natural' place
for the new message is half way down your list? Will it determine a travel
delta or something similar to determine whether to snap you to the message?

I'm guessing you can't sort your email.

I've run into this problem before (how to orient a view of a list that is
updated in the background). Google, for example, partitions the list into 'all
items' and 'new items' so if you've paged half way through the list, the
incoming item is added to the 'new items' view and a visual indicator is made
that a new item exists (cf. Google Reader).

~~~
snprbob86
Your post reminds me of a discovery I made a few weeks ago that BLEW MY MIND:

You can not sort messages in Gmail.

I'm betting that reading that statement just caused a bunch of people to say
"Really?" and go check, but it's for real. In several years of using Gmail, I
never felt the need. Search always found what I wanted. I mentioned this to
some people in my office and they were similarly stunned that they never
noticed.

One curmudgeonly former Outlook jockey said that he's missed that feature
forever. _shrug_. When I used to use Outlook on an Exchange server, search
frequently didn't find messages that I already had open! They were just
missing from the index, word stemming didn't work, or one of many other
problems. Also, I used to hit my storage quota and have to sort by size to
delete offending large attachments. Never have any of those problems with
Gmail, so why would I need sort?

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cracki
Last time I checked, gmail doesn't do word stemming either, or substring
matches.

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kevinchen
Very interesting findings. But, can you imagine the author explaining
something more complicated?

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Confusion
Yes, and he would succeed in style. I'm reminded of Sipser's intro to theory
of computation: lots of images paint a very clear picture. Much clearer than
when you would find yourself forced to draw all those images yourself (which
you simply wouldn't do and you would instead settle for _thinking_ you
understood it). This is much simpler, but there are enough folks for which it
is equally hard as intro to ToC was the first time for CS geeks.

~~~
kevinchen
Perhaps you're right. But I think that the article could be summed up in a few
bullet points without losing detail.

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peyton
On a related note, I feel like the iPhone is less "eager" to rotate after
being held in the same orientation for a while. E.g. I browse Safari in
landscape mode for ten minutes, rotate the phone to portrait, and it takes a
few extra seconds for the transition to register.

Anybody else noticed this?

~~~
mcav
I think my iPhone's rotation algorithm is this:

When I want it to _not_ rotate, it rotates anyway. I must then fuddle with the
multitasking bar to hit the Lock Orientation button.

When I want it to rotate, it seems to take ages before it rotates. Or, I
forget that I have rotation lock on, and then have to turn it off first.

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notyourwork
That was quite a long write-up for something that I thought was obvious just
from using the iPhone for a bit of time.

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rdamico
Great insight into a UI so good nobody will ever notice it (not being
sarcastic there). Reminds me of your awesome post on the tab resizing UI for
Google Chrome. Well done!

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regularfry
I really wish Gwibber would learn that lesson.

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tehwalrus
hmm, this is why I never scroll in big lists: just search.

the phone only caches about 100 emails per inbox anyway, so odds on the email
just isn't there by scrolling. searching will go and fetch older ones from the
server too, and the results sit there (new emails or no) until you're done
with them.

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triggercityFL
Swell. Doesn't stop me from flying into a rage when it decides it's time to
delete (not archive, mind you, delete) everything from my inbox without
warning despite the 6+ gigs i have free on the device. Thanks Mail App. Go
f*ck yourself.

~~~
gnaffle
Sounds more like another POP3 mail application downloading and deleting your
messages, AFAIK Mail.app never deletes messages in any Inbox regardless of
available space. So either that, or you've hit a very rare bug since deleting
peoples inboxes would be headline news on par with the Android SMS bug.

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jgavris
i did this in the chat view for messageparty :) if (!isScrolledUp)

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alanfalcon
This is why there's a sentence on page 41 of the User Experience book I'm
reading which reads "Apple, Apple, Apple, iPod, iPod, iPod, iPhone, iPhone,
iPhone[1]."

Any good UX culture should catch these kinds of details and implement them
right, the problem is the lack of good UX cultures beyond a couple prominent
examples.

[1]Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs

