Slashdot Mirror
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."
Evolution has reached a new milestone
Does that mean there was a beneficial mutation?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
But I normally do try and keep it quiet. Please no more slashdot headlines about me, ok?
I live in a giant bucket.
Does that mean the kitchen sink is also included, or will that come along with the next release?
Har har. Hopefully, others trying to make this joke will see this post, and see that it is not funny, and think twice.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that many of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
I beat the Slashdotting by grabbing this a mere hour ago :-)
The blurb fails to mention the one new feature which makes this release very worthwhile, at least for me... Sound support! You can now have it play a sound on receipt of any incoming mail. Even better, you can use sounds as actions in filters, so you can set it up to not beep at you every 30 seconds when you receive spam or mail list traffic.
Also of note is the increased feeling of polish moving from 1.08. I really can't wait for the 1.4 release when it's ported to Gnome 2.
I used to like Evolution, but after this low blow, I think I might change my mind. How can they add Emacs support and not VI support? Since everyone knows that VI is better than Emacs.
</sarcasm>
"It's nice to know evolution hasn't stopped."
If you try to download it from Kansas, you'll get a 404 telling you that evolution never existed.
I think Evolution is VERY comparable to Outlook. I love some of the features that it has that Outlook lacks. For instance the ability to view HTML formatted mail but not download embedded images off the net. This means no more dot clear images tracking the message and no auto-run scripts doing dirty deeds.
;)
VFolders, a method of storing searches in a folder view format, are very nice. I must confess though, I don't use it much. I only have 5 VFolders configured.
Calendaring and contact management is great too, though I can't speak for Exchange interoperability with the Calendar, I feel confident based on Evolution that the connector would be good too.
As a whole I strongly recommend Evolution. It is an Outlook killer. Unfortunately though, it doesn't forward Melissa, Code-Red, Anna Kourikova, I Love You.....
They just renamed it "Intelligent Design"
(rim-shot)
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Isn't it nice when you're having a discussion on IRC about Evolution needing to be ported to GTK2, you Google for the time line and get a post from July saying it'll be worked on after Evolution 1.2.
Then, I thought "well, I'll read the latest months news on the Evolution mailing list" and see this announcement.
Lo and behold, a trip to Slashdot, and what has just been posted.
This all happened between my morning and lunchtime Slashdot reading! Woo, the universe is on fire today. Perhaps if I think about Duke Nukem Forever it'll be out by next Tuesday.
Applause to Ximian for their new release and to the GTK2 developers everywhere. Gnome 2 is turning KDE users' heads.
Sigh. No. There's nothing about X11 that dictates that. In fact, in many respects, X11 is far more advanced than Windows. It's down to the authors of the application as to whether they want to copy or to innovate. Sadly with Evolution, they seem to mostly be going for the former, but that's their choice. If Ximian were targeting Windows instead of X11, I'm sure they'd still be bringing out essentially the same product.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
(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...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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*
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Can you run visual basic scripts on Evolution mail on exchange? (Or some other scripting language)
:>
One of the things I do when my email gets too big, run a vb script that saves all attachments. Then deletes the attachment from the email. I can take a 100meg folder and reduce it to 5 megs. Currently I have a few mailing lists and that plus normal work email its easy to get about 30 megs of email a day. (hourly statistics, office docs, etc)
Can you administrate permissions on your outlook folders and mailing lists with evolution mail? (exchange compatible question again)
We have a few emailing lists for vendors/interal departments/etc, and I need to be able to add/remove them.
Also we give permission to our folders when we are on vacation, so people can scan for any customer who emailed us directly without going to the correct support email address. (Ya, customers would never do that would they?)
Rich format or just html for email?
I know when I'm trying to work with someone its nice to highlight some instructions in yellow, or key parts. Rich Text is very handy for that. I guess html would be ok, but I tend to stay away from that in outlook.
Meeting options?
I saw the screenshot of the meeting availability option, does that work with exchange's availability meeting info?
Netmeeting (for meetings)
Some of our meetings are spread around the US, so we use netmeeting so people can watch the powerpoint slideshow. Also a few of us can work on a document at the same time, or watch someone give a demo. All the netmeeting info is included in the email, the user just has to click and view. (That is still confusing for some people...)
Recall emails.
Can you recall an email after you sent it? I see people doing that all the time, i normally turn it off so they cant recall and hide the evidence.
PST files.
I'm currently using office undervmware. But I share my configs/rules/etc on a windows share, so I can boot into winxp when I want the extra speed (laptops are slow..), when I need to work on very large excel spreadsheets.
Hell, one of the reasonsI can use Koffice/OO/SO is sometimes they use =hex2dec office addins, or other nonstandard stuff.
-
You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun. - Al Capone (1899 - 1947)
"With pine I can use all the keyboard shortcuts I'm used to. To each his^H^H^Hher own, I guess."
Is that why you're using ctrl+6+h instead of a backspace key?
This explains the split between Emacs and Lucid Emacs and the journey to Emacs/XEmacs in more detail than you ever could have wanted.
I find it odd that you would clone Outlook and then not be able to import the files that Outlook uses. I mean no matter what Ximian says, Evolution IS an Outlook clone for linux users.
Without the ability to import PST files they are completely ignoring the very users which they are trying to attract. Unless of course they aren't interested in those users, which I would have a hard time believing considering how the program has been designed.
More on Evolution itself, I think besides the PST thing, its a fantastic program. Compared to the early versions, it launches and closes in a reasonable period of time. It's good looking and really I think is without a doubt the best opensource "full-featured" email/Pim every made.
One thing I also wonder about is a win32 port of the program. Just like OpenOffice eases the transition because you can get started on a windows version first, so would a windows version of Evolution. I know, easier said then done, but its something to think about.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I hate to feed the trolls, but debian unstable has xfree 4.2.1 as a quick look at the xfree86 package page would reveal.
Actually it's in testing as well.
Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
Hmmm....
"its nice to see that Evolution hasn't stopped"
And when I clicked on the link, I got an ad for Helix DNA.....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I think you're absolutely right. (This is getting off topic but since this entire thread formed here anyway I might as well say something about that...)
...well usable)"
There are a lot of people who think that:
- "No, OSS GUI interfaces are not broken, they are in fact superior (just not
- "X is so much more advanced" when it is in fact a pain in the ass and slow as hell even when used over what it is made for - network connections.
- "By the way text mode is the way to the future, GUI is for faggots" which I think doesn't need any further comment
- "Linux has sooo *not* a dependency hell but Windows has" ignoring the fact that Linux libraries situation (source and compiled objects alike) is totally out of hand because often times you can't even run two apps alongside because they need different versions
- "Linux software installation is just so smooth" when in reality one can install even complicated apps on Windows and OSX within mere minutes while on Linux you are lucky if it takes under 2 hours to get something running.
Now, all this is not neccessarily a bad sign for the state of the OSS developer community, if people would just *recognize* the problems and try to fix them in the future. But sadly nobody seems to care, quite on the contrary. Everyone pointing out these problems will be marked "flamebait" disregarding the fact that a well meaning wake-up call often originates from a friendly corner.
Contrary to popular belief in the linux community, Microsoft is actually one of the software companies most frequently criticized by usability professionals. They are the most frequent inductee in the Interface Hall of ShameJust because they've got more money than some industrialized nations doesn't mean they aren't capable of cranking out some horrendously bad designs. If Microsoft had effective usability, they never would have come out with Window-in-Window MDI, multi-row tabs, or any of the other atrocities they've released over the years. Unfortunately, Open Source Software has incorporated more than their fair share of these stupid designs in the mistaken belief that microsoft knew what they were doing.
A developer community is only successful in areas where they have very strong beliefs and values that are advantageous. Linux has succeeded so well on the server because the linux development community had very strong values regarding security and stability, and these sorts of values were advantageous on the server. Unfortunately, linux people are unix people, and unix people have had a long standing tradition of calling end-users stupid, telling them to go RTFM, and decrying the field of usability as BS and usability folks as "whiners".
Who'd want to do usability for free for people who say things like:
Open Source doesn't need money to improve usability. It needs an attitude adjustment.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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. /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.
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
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Wonderful. They take an email client, and add emacs key bindings, thinking all of us emacs users will switch over. Why switch to Evolution when we have an email client, a newsreader, a web browser, a text editor, a blender, and a kitchen sink in one 20MB tarball? If I want to use emacs-style bindings for my email, I'll use emacs, thank you very much :).
The question is *. The solution is emacs.
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
http://www.cyberus.ca/~phoenix/outport/
which exports Calendar,Contacts, and Tasks to Evolution.
That just leaves doing the manual mail part via Mozilla.
I guess that works, but its still a bit messy and not really appealing except for individual users. Its still better than nothing though I suppose.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Yes, happened to me too: calender crashed, and contact list completely whiped away.
Do the following:
exit evolution
killev
restart evolution
Now everything works and you have your contacts back end the calender works.
Tino Meinen
Plus, its the only thing that could make outlook express safe!
(Except pulling the plug on the network connection)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
1) I don't want to have to receive everyone's full calendar by email in order to search for free time (when not using Exchange). Last I checked there was a way to enter the URL of someone else's calendar, but no instructions in the manual on how to format the calendar on the web/ftp site. And certainly nothing about how to put it up there. Put some WebDAV hooks into Evo and let an Apache server act as a "calendar hub".
2) Would be nice to sync my calendar with Yahoo! That's what keeps my wife on Windows.
3) Perhaps a plugin API for syncing to address books on cellphones.
That's all for now. I can't move until those work. Pine and Yahoo! until then.
Intelligent Life on Earth
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steven.obrien2/index. html
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gnome&m=1010157075 21446&w=2
http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/1596/en/c ygwin.html
Unfortunately, I don't see any new efforts at a port of Evolution to Windows, but as it improves folks will start to demand it everywhere they are.
Mac OSX users are much more lucky -- they can get Evolution right now. Fink lists it as a ported app.
It would be nice to have a Windows CD with all X apps so that folks can see that *nix systems aren't usually text-based or some ugly form of CDE. Till then, I've found the boot CD and full Debian distributionKnoppix to be an ideal introduction. Blew the socks off of a admin I showed it to who didn't know it was possible, and impressed others who like the idea of Linux but can't be bothered with actually learning anything (kids, job, wife, do the math).
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.