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Preview Helix Code's "Evolution"
sigsegv writes: "The first preview tarball of Evolution is out on the Gnome FTP site. Pretty slick looking for those attached to gui e-mail clients. Personally, I still prefer mutt, but I know a few people very eager to see this. =8] "
I hate to be a downer for you, but Open Source is not the answer to every question. Many open source programs are solutions to problems no one but the developer would care to see a solution for, but reading email is something everyone and their mother wants to do. My point: Microsoft can design better user interfaces, Open Source can implement them better.
Now I realise that is a lot to swallow, but I do have an argument to back that up. In essence, programmers in general, Open Source hackers in particular, make bad user interface designers (I know, I'm a good coder, and only a mediocre user interface designer). People who make good user interfaces are called user interface designers, people who write GUI code are user interface implementors. They can be the same people, but those people are doing two fundamentally different tasks. The one task (programming) involves studying data, processes, the user interface specification of the user interface designers and understanding, then creating an implementation that balances all of those aspects. The other task involves studying users, studying the task, and specifying a user interface. The point is, Open Source works primarily because programmers enjoy programming. Hackers may may have a day job where they get paid for programming, but hackers see it not as a means to an end (ie. a paycheck) but as something they like doing, and are lucky enough to get paid for. User interface designers are like engineers, they do it because it's their job, and no one else wants to do it.
How do good comercial graphical user interfaces get designed and implemented? An insightful software development manager hires or directs a user interface designer to create a user interface, and the programmers write the code. How does open source software get "designed?" People who just enjoy coding get down and write it, for the joy of the job. Notice that the Open Source model has no room for usability testing, or quality assurance. Both of these happen to a small degree, but usability needs to exist from the initial stages. The only way really user friendly software gets written is by creating a design, then writing code which continuously improves from a mere approximation of the design to something that fully captures it.
To wrap things up: I think it is a extremely reasonable position for the GNOME developers to take. Borowing GUI designs is legal, and lets the GNOME hackers do what they are good at. I think more software could stand to be written this way: a user interface is originally designed and implemented by some company. They make some money on ititial versions of the software. Later, when the software becomes commodotised (as Outlook surely has), Open Source will produce a stabler, faster, more portable, more extensible, cheaper (obviously), more interoperable (standards compliant), more customizable and generally better replacement. Open Source and Commercial software both have their strengths. Luckily, there is only a little overlap, and I see this as a model for the way they can work together.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
I am glad you pointed this out.
Evolution is logically split into two parts (there is a process barrier between these parts).
The first are the User Interface Bonobo components. The other part is the non-graphical part that actually drives the data back end (The Wombat process, which is also in turn a Bonobo component).
The Wombat does not use or require a windowing system to be running, it just acts as a serializer and as the data provider for the actual user interface. The user interface can be a terminal application talking to the Wombat trough CORBA, a Web-based mailer/calendar/addressbook, a custom application you wrote that uses any of the above services in Perl (using the Perl/CORBA bindings from Owen Taylor for instance) or an Emacs based interface.
A lot of love has gone into making Evolution "right" in as many aspects as possible.
We welcome more comments on it, and constructive cricitism.
Miguel.
The reason you need to be able to execute VB code in Excel spreadsheets is that very large sets of code have been written for various sheets in the Excel world. Neither you nor I probably care.
But people doing heavy-weight work with Excel do, and that is stopping them from migrating to a free software platform. Jody, one of the main Gnumeric hackers and Michael Meeks can tell you more about this.
That being said, the GNOME Basic implementation is a sandboxed version of Visual Basic (just like Java) unlike the Microsoft version.
Btw, TeX is a turing-complete language, and people are known to write fairly extensive TeX scripts (and yes, those appear on day to day research papers written in TeX).
TeX while processing your files can request user input to fill in values.
The features being copied are not being copied because we think it is "exciting" to copy the feature, or because we want to be check-to-check feature complete. They are required due to large packages that depend on that. Ask any serious Excel user.
...but I am getting really sick of this move to more and more graphical interfaces for everything. There are times when pretty pictures are nice, they make things more intuative, i.e. having Mozilla or Netscape around is often easier than using lynx.
Mutt has always worked rather well for me. It handles pgp well, and works nicely with my school's new LDAP database. How does Evolution handle this? What do we gain from the interface?
To me, it just adds a level of abstraction to a realativly simply procedure and makes it seem less solid and real.
Perhaps I should not complain so much. This is the kind of thing that might make my grandmother go out and get a Linux box instead of Windoze, but I will still continue to use mutt.
-----
Vikhozhu odin ya na darogu;
Skvoz' tuman kremnisti put' blectit;
Noch' tikha. Pystinya vnemlet bogu,
Rhapsody in Numbers
Well, we take security seriously in the GNOME project. Our implementation of Visual Basic for GNOME (it is required for perfect Office compatibility) actually runs in a Sandboxed environment, just like Java does.
The equivalent of the "ILOVEYOU" virus would generate a security exception in any application using GB in the future (no application currently uses GB, as it is still a project under development).
Miguel.
That is the goal, Evolution will support the standard calendaring systems available on other products, like Exchange.
Inflitrate the organizations from the bottom up with open source software is the way Nat puts it
Miguel.
At home, I use pine for my personal mail. It's good for straight-forward text-messages-and-tahnk-you-very-much sort of stuff. However, my work involves lots and lots of meetings and airplane trips and projects and to-do lists and hastily-scribbled notes and organization of ideas and collaboration. I travel constantly, and need a system that helps me keep on top of things. Outlook is excellent at this.
If you are just a programmer, (or studying to be one), then Outlook is both overkill and generally a miss. Your to-do list is probably best kept on a piece of paper next to your machine, and there is no reason to integrate messaging with other aspects of your workflow. However, those of us with ties to the rest of the business world get a lot of benefit from the versatility of the Outlook client. I hate to say this, but your needs are so different from a typical business-users needs, that I don't think you could grok them.
Note that the only other MS desktop client program I really care for is Excel. I prefer Abiword to Word a hundred-fold.
In any case, I think that the Outlook client is an excellent bar to aim for.
Well, when I wrote Gnumeric, I wrote it not because I needed a spreadsheet, but because GNOME needed a spreadsheet. I have basically no interest in spreadsheets, and have never used a spreadsheet.
Copying the design, model, and idea of an existing product that people knew how to use was better than sitting down and "reinventing" the concept behind spreadsheets.
This turned out to be very good, as various Excel hackers joined the team, and they have improved Gnumeric a lot to suit their needs, and address problems that Excel could not address, nor could fix for them. And by being a familiar user interface, and a program compatible with Excel, we benefit more users.
I am not doing free software development because I want to stand against Microsoft, but because i want to give users free software (free as in freedom). So copying the Excel user interface to me was never a moral problem
Miguel.
Folks, please be careful when running this. This isn't even alpha, really- the version number is 0.0. In announcing this, Miguel sent the following to the evolution-devel list:
"As you explore Evolution, please understand that most of our work has been focused on the backend engine which drives the entire system and not on the user interface. We are just cresting the hill now, though, and will be pouring most of our love and attention into the UI from here out. But at least you know that you're not using demoware.
So, time for the nerdy disclaimer. Evolution will: crash, lose your mail, leave stray processes running, consume 100% CPU, race, lock, send HTML mail to random mailing lists, and embarass you in
front of your friends and co-workers. Use at your own risk."
So... don't slam it for lack of functionality or anything like that yet. Wait until the developers think it is at least worthy of a version number...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
The reason I'm excited about Evolution is not that it's just another pretty GUI client that LOOKS like Outlook.
No, I don't care about the looks. What I do care about is that it can get mail through an exchange server and support scheduling through an exchange server as well, with really any GUI you care to put together.
Wherever I go, I try and use Linux clients at work. This would almost always work out OK, with one exception - I always have to dual-boot to get to my mail and schedule. I rather hate the Outlook scheduler, but I have no choice in using it - usually everyone else schedules meetings with it, and also a lot of places I've been at use it as a frontend to reserve conference rooms.
So, something like Evolution is really the final step in freeing MANY people to use Linux fulltime at work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Evolution Model/View split (the split between the user interface and the actual data, which is running as a separate process (The Wombat)) was designed precisely to solve this problem correctly.
The information displayed on Evolution is not actually loaded into the GUI application you load, it is all handled by a separate process (The Wombat), and the way the code works is by making notifications to the user interface process when data in the wombat changes.
The Palm Pilot syncing tools work without even launching the GUI application, they just talk directly to the Wombat, and sync with the Wombat.
Now, our filtering system is pretty advanced, internally it uses a Scheme like system that is evaluated at various stages of the life of a mail message (reception, delivery, archival, indexing) the rules are applied and a number of actions can take place at each stage. This is used to create the regular "folders" that people are used to.
Another extra option are the "vfolders", these are folders constructed on the flight from a query to the mail database. For example, you could construct a folder with the last 10 messages from your wife that contain the word "Dont forget to bring home..." or all mail you have sent to a mailing list that was CCed to rms for instance.
The possibilities are infinite.
Miguel.