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Interview with Miguel de Icaza
GonzoJohn writes: "Linux Orbit editor-in-chief John Gowin contacted Helix Code to catch up on where their products and projects were heading in the New Year. Miguel de Icaza, GNOME evangelist and developer and Helix Code co-founder was kind enough to answer our ten question interview. Included in the interview is some new information on the Red Carpet Project, the next iteration of the Helix Update utility." Miguel also speaks here about the not-yet-feature-frozen Evolution (what happens when Evolution is declared "finished"? ;) ). Is anyone out there using Evolution in their own workplace?
The thing that worries me Miguel is that a lot of functionality is going into graphic apps directly, instead of going into utilities that are managed through graphic apps. Since graphic apps are almost entirely non-integratable using linguistic glue, we're in severe danger of losing touch with the key element that made Linux/BSD/Unix the powerhouse that it is, namely programmable integration through non-graphic scripting.
Your comments about Red Carpet brought this to mind vividly, and raised other spectres as well. We all hope that Red Carpet will become a great generic package manager, but alas it seems that the power user that is doing remote or scripted non-graphic installations is not going to be able to make use of your good work.
Frankly, graphic-only apps suck, or more technically, are not as powerful as graphic apps that interface to underlying non-graphic utilities. Why is Helix going down this non-optimal road towards Microsoft-style systems of low intrinsic power? Why not have your cake and eat it too by using graphics for interfacing only, not for implementing new functionality?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Well, I originally heard of query-based folders in the Paquiderm mailer (Jim Gettys showed this to us a long time ago). Paquiderm, and the help of Nyao Nguyen (who was a VM author). Jamie Zawinski later pushed for the current setup which is: work the way people expect using files-as-folders and add vfolders, and let people migrate.
Now, I did not claim it was a new invention, just that we hope that Evolution will help popularize this way of handling e-mail.
Miguel.
As I said on the interview (but it seems the url got lost somewhere), we have been working on a cross-platform set of tools to configure and customize your Linux system.
You can see Arturo's screenshots here:
http://primates.helixcode.com/~arturo/hst
Miguel.
An Intereing note, As much as they spout 'Free! Free! Free! Source Code!!', HelixCode's site does not have Any packages in either the SlackWare .tgz format (big deal, most slack users like to compile from source), or Source Packages other than in SRPM format...
I can't speak for Slack users, but I can tell you that you're dead wrong about source packages for Debian.
This directory is full of tarballs and diffs; using "apt-get source [Helix package of choice]" with the appropriate lines in your sources.list file will get you a source tree.
Jay (=
It's not about "copying windows." It's about using the good ideas from a variety of platforms and paradigms, supporting and implementing existing languages, and providing freedom. If you don't like Visual Basic (I'm not fond of it, myself), there is no reason why you have to use it. However, if you want to read an Excel spreadsheet in Gnumeric that uses VB scripting, the gnome basic support that's integrated with Gnumeric comes in handy. And if you're a windows programmer familiar with Visual Basic, this allows easy migration to the GNU/Linux/Gnome platform. Once there, hopefully you'll see the merits of other languages such as Perl and Python.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
Miguel de Icaza: We have counted around 450,000 installations of the full Helix GNOME desktop from our main site. We have also distributed around ten thousand CDS. So we figure we have over half a million people using Helix Code GNOME now.
I realize that "total number of Helix GNOME downloads" and "users" is difficult to estimate, but does anyone else think that 500,000 is an overestimate?
450,000 installations & 10,000 CD != 500,000 users (No, I'm not arguing that the simple math is wrong).
Many of those installations are probably reinstallations. I've completely reinstalled Helix-Gnome onto this desktop right here 4-5 times.
I did the newbie http://go-gnome.com thing once, I downloaded & installed the RPM's manualy (After accidently deleting/overwriting something or trying to satisfy a mysterious dependancies for some some nifty-sounding-but-experimental package), and I completely reinstalled the entire thing from the source on Saturday. So that's 4-5 installations, yet I am One user. (And I did the same thing to my work Computer, but I imagine that counts as a second user in their stats).
Many of my Helix Gnome friends do this thing (But less often then Crazy-agressive-maybe-reinstalling-will-make-pilot link-and-esound-work! me).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
If Miguel's goal is to make Evolution very "windowsy", is Miguel going to add in Gnome Basic VBA scripting abilities? It will be very interesting to see just how far Helix takes the whole "let's copy windows" thing.
Given, Slackware isn't the #1 distribution, or anything, but if they've gone through the effort to port to Solaris and HPUX and package for them, they ought to make source .tar.gz's available... After all,the Helix gnome is a lot prettier than the normal GNOME one... And Slackware users shouldn't be left in the dust here just because .rpm (and to a lesser extent .deb) is overrated...
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
Virtual folders have been around for a while, among other places, in the Emacs VM mail reader. It would be nice if open source projects would acknowledge other open source projects.
(Gee, Miguel is beginning to sound like he's making a venture capital pitch.)
For many years i used pine and/or emacs as my mail reader. I tried kmail and it was not too bad for a while, but I don't run the K Desktop exclusivley (I run blackbox...roar) and K apps aometimes suffer negative effects from being run outside of the entire K environment. So it was back to pine
I tried Balsa for a while, it was pretty, but at the time, it was not threaded and died, alot. Once again back to pine.
A month ago or so, I decided to give Evolution a try. I must say, it is one hell of a good mail client , yes it crashes once in a while, but I just start it up again and there are no corruptions or anything. The mail filtering system works really well. The user interface is dead simple to set-up, and *heck* it's pretty.
I couldn't begin to compare it to MS Outlook (or Outlook Express), since I haven't used that mail client in many years.
But from a guy that has used alot of the new email clients kicking around, and has always reverted back to good ol' pine, Evolution is my mail client now.
Of course there is a soft spot in my heart for pine, it's still configured to read my Evolution mail box (easier for remote mail checking). And the uh *calendar* I dunno, it looks pretty, but I'm not a big calendar user...I prefer mass disorganization in that dept. *grin*
From a pure free software perspective, Evolution is designed to be the best mail and personal information manager free software product
I'm pretty sure that most users, and especially those coming from the Windows platform, couldn't care less. Software like Outlook Express has been free for ages, so that's pretty much the norm (not the exception) for this kind of software
Having used Evolution for a while, I'm really, really happy with this product - it's the first viable replacement for the POS Netscape mail client I've ever seen. However, I think that a focus on how GNU-compliant the software is doesn't help anyone: let's work to make this the best mail client available anywhere, period!
I know of a lot of Solaris users who wouldn't mind paying a sizable client license fee for a working GUI mail client equivalent to Outlook Express but without the enormous overhead of the Microsoft product (or even the Netscape client, for that matter...)