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Evolution 1.0 Beta 1 Released
battery841 writes: "Evolution 1.0 Beta 1 has been released. An announcement has been released. The RPMs and tarballs can be downloaded from Ximian. This is the first beta release, and a major step to the much awaited 1.0 release." The last time I tried Evolution it was very buggy, but that was a long time ago - time to give it another try.
The last time I tried Evolution it was very buggy
Case in point: George "Dubya" Bush
*rim shot*
First of all, the link to the sources provided in the original announcement and the "latest release" page on ximian.com has the
First impression is that it looks great! Well, honestly my first impression was "fscking peice of
I'm not going to bitch at UI problems here
You have to go to your folders to get to imap mailboxes. When you click on something the mailboxes 'tab' immediately dissapears without what you clicked on highlighting, so you don't know if you mis-clicked or not (unless its showing all the time from the view menu).
I've been so looking forward to the nice integrated GUI gpg support. Sadly, my key id (which the interface for sucks btw, you are not given any idication what you're supposed to put in there or where to get the information from) is NOT SAVED when I apply the settings.
S/MIME certificate support. Oh god I thought I was going to blow a load when I saw this. I have been waiting for ages for this in something other than netscape mail (which sucks) and I was overjoyed to have this. Certificate ID? What is that? Where do I get it? The "digital ids" button does nothing. When I type in my name (no clue what else to do) it isn't saved either, so I guess it doesn't matter.
When I click on tasks I get asked to pick a time zone. When I click on calendar I get asked to pick a time zone. Shouldn't they be able to share information?
Even after picking the time zone it doesn't appear in the tools-> settings menu
Under tasks tools->tasks preferences doesn't do anything
At one point I got a 0x0 window that I couldn't get rid of. It didn't dissapear when I shut down evolution and I ended up having to killall evolution-mail to get rid of it
The "Define Views" is a neat idea, but very buggy.
If the main component crashes (which it did thanks to the above item about defining views) wouldn't it be a good idea to give the user the option to restart it?
Threaded message list option is not saved
.debs have features turned off or something.
All in all a bit dissapointing, especially for the pgp and s/mime options. Also absent were smtp/imap/pop3 over ssl (which I thought were said to be there, but maybe not). These things would be good to have, and would (IMHO) show the mark of a truely mature and advanced mail client (and would make me an instant believer!
So conclusion, much better, and probably great for day to day mail, but still has a ways to go before I'll switch. I'm going to go and file some bugs now, and maybe build from source in case the
iirc you have to still select all mails in a folder; ctrl+y ( apply filters ) to apply filters to stored mail.
At least once it failed
Also the mailbox format is easy to remover - I corrupted my inbox several times now -- often all I have to do is remove the *.ibex for that folder and it's fixed...When pine uses imap, it doesn't use any mailboxes locally and completely relies on the server. Since I use Cyrus, it allows me to have >100000 messages in a folder without any loss of performance.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
...was one released yesterday, and it was kinda ok except that it has a poor idea when to ask for passwords for IMAP mailboxes, and was hard to convince to apply filters to the whole mailbox if it was already cached. However the main problem for me was that it always caches mail received through IMAP locally -- I have huge mailboxes that I never want to see sorted, so I prefer pine's way of handling IMAP where cache is small (and fits in memory), and messages are read only when user scrolls to them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You mean that crappy movie that was in the theaters was only a 'beta'? I want my 8 bucks back!
</joke>
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Doesn't beta exactly mean the feature list is frozen?
If you are using potato, you can grab what is effectively an RC beta (1.0.91) from ftp.ximian.com/pub/evolution/your_distro_here/ The more it gets tested, the better the next RC release will be. [Disclosure: I'm the Ximian Bugmaster.]
IAAL,BIANLY
Evolution supports using SSL over IMAP, SMTP and POP3 on top of many others.
The camel library from Evolution is the most advanced mail library in existance right now. The API was inspired by the JavaMail design, but it has been extended and improved to deal with many real world situations that JavaMail did not cope back in the day.
You can also read an functional overview of Evolution and what it has to offer.
Since Evolution is not feature frozen, we are polishing the GUI and killing all bugs that we have reported so far, you can help by going to the developers page and learn about how to report bugs on Evolution or how to send your favorite patch and improvement.
You can get Evolution using Red Carpet (that is how I installed it myself a few minutes ago). Select the `Ximian Preview' channel and then select Evolution, all the required software will be installed for you.
Finally, now that I am pasting URLs, I would like to say that on the preview channel you can also find the latest two great contributions of Ximian to GNOME (plug, plug). The Ximian Setup Tools is there for people to test (ie, unified System Administration across Unix systems, with a nice and friendly GNOME UI). The technology behind it is extremely nice. And we are also previewing the Metatheme selector, which allows you to change all the theme setting across the board in your desktop.
Love,
Miguel.
Evolution has one of the most complete IMAP implementations in a mail client, especially an open source one. Evolution also supports iMIP and iTIP scheduling.
The problem with the Outlook files is that they are in a proprietry database format, and the only way to access the data stored in them is via mapi.dll. The same with Exchanges messaging, the over the wire protocol is proprietry.
I understand that Michael Zucchi is working on a system where you can point Evolution at your pine mailbox and have it read that, so it means that you can use Evolution locally and then pine remotely. You'd be best to ask the evolution-list @ ximian.com to find out more
Don't go away thinking that C++ is some paragon of Object Orientated virtue - it's a horrible mixture of low level and high level, with bits of generic programming (templates) and functional programming (STL) thrown in for good measure; all mixed and blended to produce a very unintuitive language, and one of the largest specifications since PL/1.
There are advantages to doing OO code in C -- it shows you exactly what is going on, and doesn't hide anything from you. Most people would use lots of boiler-plate templates, and just fill in the blanks.
If you want simplicity and ease of use, try some real high-level languages. Python, for example, shows you that mixed metaphor languages don't have to be a cluttered, unreadable mess. Lisp (and its modern relatives like Scheme) is beautifully pure, with a simple specification (ignoring the abomination of CL), and is also very readable once you've hit your head against the monitor 5 or 6 times (although I wouldn't want to code it in an editor without a decent Lisp-mode).
Getting back to the main point: KDE may be more polished, but at the moment Gnome has better apps in many areas. Hopefully, Gnome will gain polish, KDE will gain applications, and in 2 years time we will have two excellent free UNIX desktops.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Don't forget the main unspoken point of KDE and Gnome and many of their applications ! their aim is to bring Windows users to Linux, not to convince geeks who already use Linux and know about Mutt or Pine or whatever, and can also find their way through the multitude of other Linux applications. So the applications need to feel loke Windows applications to attract Windows users duh !
In fact, relatively few software releases reach Slashdot (a few more if you count the sections, where slightly more esoteric releases might reach, say, the Apache section).
A 1.0 version (OK, a 1.0 beta in this case) of what is one of the most-awaited pieces of software in the Free software world is not the typical announcement you'd find on Freshmeat -- are you nodding along with me, or shaking your head in disagreement?
Yesterday, Freshmeat listed around 70 pieces of software, and doubtless other sites (like the apps page of KDE, or the recent software of GNOME's site) listed apps which were not also listed at freshmeat. Some of that software is probably just as interesting overall as Evolution, and a lot of smaller pieces are certainly interesting when viewed for what they might turn into (sound aps plus video aps, some cool possibilities for the near future).
Slashdot has a lot of other types of stories, but heck, since a lot of people here are interested in Free / Open Source software, is it not appropriate that occasionally we mention ... Free / Open Source software?
Also, completely serious, if you know of stories you'd rather see here, submit them :). That's where the vast majority of stories on this site come from. A lot of people pointed out the release of Evolution, and besides, it's something that's been the topic of both excitement and criticism for a long time. Outside of mailing lists, how many other places do you get to see comments from Miguel explaining in near-real time his company's software / plans? I think that's pretty cool.
And as a last resort, you can also choose not to see the stories in categories where software might be announced or talked about; just go to your user preferences. I'm personally glad to see this announcement here (just logged in after 4 hours of driving), but tastes differ violently. If we had a "sports" section, I'd probably block that ;)
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Munitions regulations forbid exporting this software to Kansas.
Tip: if Evolution seems to load up really slowly then you probably need to restart your oaf server. Just run killev followed by oaf-slay and Presto. Or else follow the windows approach and wait for your next reboot :)
Screenshot: check out the funky new (and configurable) summary page!
I'm a big evolution supporter. Have always liked it. I like the fact that the entirety of the program is GPL'ed (Unlike certain products from certain nameless others.
But it's a little bit discouraging when you install the binaries through red-carpet, rm -rf your existing ~/evolution directory, run oaf-slay, start evolution and then find that it crashed consistently if you try to open the 'Welcome to Evolution' email.
I'll go file a bug report now... - James
signature smigmature
- James
Screw 3...