Evolution Reaches A New Milestone

dalutong writes "Ximian has recently released Evolution v1.2 to the masses. New features include (among other ones that don't affect me as much) optional Emacs and XEmacs bindings in the email composer and much faster mailbox indexing (and thus loading.) It's nice to know evolution hasn't stopped."

Comments

Why Open Source Needs Microsoft

[LordSah]

I see Evolution as a great example that open-source cannot be end-all solution to the world's software problems. A big reason is usability: open-source doesn't have the resources to research and develop effective UI. Usability experts, consumer studies, prototype testing and well-designed feedback loops are all needed to design user interfaces that are intuitive and efficient.

It takes for-profit companies, with a lot of money to throw at the problem, to design original and effective UI's. Evolution neatly copies Microsoft Outlook's user experience. It's a good thing that MS put all that work into designing the UI, and didn't give Ximian any guff over using it.

From the cover-my-ass dept: I'll admit that there are some exceptions. But by and large, the UI on open-source sucks unless they are copied from for-profit software, such as Outlook (for Evolution), NEXTStep or Windows (for various Window Managers), Wordperfect/MSWord (various word processors). And before somebody says that you don't need UI--Random J User cannot effectively use text-console programs without a lot of training.

Re:Why Open Source Needs Microsoft

[plierhead]

It takes for-profit companies, with a lot of money to throw at the problem, to design original and effective UI's.

This is utterly true, and it is refreshing to see someone highlighting it. To go even further, designing an effective UI is something you simply can't get right in one go, no matter how much money and experts you throw at it. Most products only develop a good UI after several versions, based on a *lot* of user feedback.

So Microsoft has to fork out on developing this great UI, and anyone who cares to can come along and pick it up for free and leverage it. Thats a great thing. And ironically its how Microsoft got where they were in the first place - not by being great innovators but by being "fast followers".

There might be a lot more OSS successes if more people swallowed their pride, decided they didn't have to reinvent the wheel, and became fast followers themselves.

Re:pine still wins out

[stefanlasiewski]

(Pay no attention to the trolls. They're probably just 15 year old immature boys).

I've used pine for the last 8 years, and it's a great program. I still consider it easier-to-use then Evolution. I've switched between Pine and Evolution a dozen times in the last 2 years. My fingers still autotype the Pine keybindings.

Several things that Evolution has over Pine:

- It's not just an email program. It's also a Contact Manager (Pine only has an addressbook), a Calendaring program, and a Todo list.
- Pine does not display message threads very well
- More intuitive message filters
- Simpler to setup multiple mail accounts
- It displays HTML and Graphics appropriately. My friends/coworkers keep sending me HTML email (HTML can be useful in email sometimes), and Pine munges 1/5 of the messages...

It'll only be an 'outlook killer'

[myowntrueself]

when people can import their outlook data files (.pst files etc) complete with calender, contacts lists, tasks and of course email.

I *know* one can export outlook data files to imap (uh, correct me if I'm using the wrong acronym there) and then re-import them to unix mail format (theres a howto on this), but, importantly;
this causes *EVERYTHING* to appear as an email item, including calender entries, contacts lists everything comes across as a piece of email. Which I regard as a lot less than useful...

Some might say thats better than nothing, I say *phhfft*

Re:A few thoughts:

[Trinition]

Great, now all we need is for it to have the one feature that Outlook still has over it. No, not Exchange integration. I mean running on Windows. I'll stick with my Microsoft utlook (*sigh*) fo rnow.

Re:What OSS really needs: UIForge

[Lord Bitman]

What we really need is a large forum for communicating User Interface ideas to programmers. The problem with OSS is that it tends to expect /everybody/ to be able to pick up the code and remove the horrible from apps. This just isnt the case.
It's true, we can't afford consultants and experts to tell us what 70% of potential customers would like to see, but we do have this whole internet out there, and something should be done to harvest the feedback.
Not saying that no options are out there right now, only that the current options arent working, and there needs to be better ways for /normal/ users, not programmers, not even just people who prefer OSS, just users of programs to, basically, complain. Until the OSS Community has a real and good forum for complaining, we arent going to see programmers taking notice and fixing things like UI problems.