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?

Comments

Evolution is my email client

[penguin_nipple]

I have always used pine in my day to day mail operations, I am a member of several email lists and recieve about 150-200 emails per day, plus the one or two personal emails i actually get addressed to me =)

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*

PLEASE focus on functionality!

[mdb31]

OK, now that the link topic has been beaten to death, perhaps a good time to discuss some of the article's content. What really annoyed me was the focus on the free availability of the software over actual functionality, as in:

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...)