Ximian Evolution's New Clothes

Lispy writes "Looks like everyone's favorite graphical email client, Ximian Evolution, will get a new interface with the upcoming release. I found a posting on the Evolution hackers bulletin board which leads to some mocked-up screenshots (here: calendar, tasks, mail, contacts and one of the shrunken navbar). Although this is mostly eyecandy, this could be the right time to make yourself heard. What do you think about a maturing Evolution that goes its own way and leaves the Outlook-like interface behind?"

Comments

clothes?

[elmegil]

Maybe they could make other things work right before worrying about the look and feel? Like the IMAP implementation? I just resolved today that I *am* going to get around to writing my own email client after the bloody thing stopped working with my IMAP INBOX for no apparent reason, and with no apparent fix in sight. And no, email clients by browser makers are not worth a damn so they're not an option either.

Re:clothes?

[good soldier svejk]

Maybe they could make other things work right before worrying about the look and feel? Like the IMAP implementation? I just resolved today that I *am* going to get around to writing my own email client after the bloody thing stopped working with my IMAP INBOX for no apparent reason, and with no apparent fix in sight.

Wouldn't it be easier to fix their implementation than to write a whole new client from scratch? That is sort of the point of Free Software; if you don't like the implementation, change it. No?

I like the outlook look

[Captal]

I like the outlook look- it seems pretty efficient to me the way they organize the folders and emails. The colors are kind of drab but other than that it's fine.

Too bad the links are /. ed already else I'd give my impression of them.

I'm always for for contemporary styling- I like the modern theme of Mozilla over the classic theme, and 3D buttons and textures are always cool!

Separating from Outlook

[dlosey]

While it would be nice to try and surpass Outlook in useability, is that something worth trying at this stage in the game? If you are trying to convince a company to use a new email client, you want to ensure them that they will not have to retrain their employees. With Ximian, they do not have a large enough user base IMHO. If I were them, I would wait until I had a little bit more market share before trying a move like that. The general office worker usually can not deal with huge software changes without retraining. I know many workers who just follow the same list of commands/buttons for checking there email, without knowing what all the commands/buttons do.

Re:Separating from Outlook

[roothog]

Actually, since Microsoft is also abandoning the current Outlook interface, as a previous poster noted, this seems like the perfect time to change interfaces. If they do not change, they look like old product. Changing keeps them current and offers the new opportunity to distinguish themselves from Outlook.

My experiance with

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Evolution fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a gnome terminal (a 3200 w/1024 of RAM with dma enabled) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to delete a 17 Meg trashcan of spam! 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running on my Windows XP system running Outlook express , which by all standards should be a lot slower than this GNOME terminal, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, galeon will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even GEdit is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Gnome terminals, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Gnome terminal that has run faster than its Windows XP counterpart, despite the Gnome terminals faster bonobo architechture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3200 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Evolution is a superior email soloution

Gnome addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Evolution over other faster, cheaper, more stable email clients.

Re:no spam filter?

[Mr.Ned]

Evolution isn't targeting your demographic. Evolution is the complete Outlook replacement. Most corporations will have a server-side spam filtering set up; while an integrated Bayesian filtering mechanism might function better, in practice it's probably not worth the individual user's time to set up and train.

A quick look thorugh the official Q & A shows a simple, local SpamAssassin integration HOWTO.

Re:Better choices out there

[elmegil]

part of the browser (lighter)

I thought it just made the browser heavier. Seems pretty pointless to me; email isn't a web page, shouldn't be a web page, and the mozilla/netscape/whatever browser based email clients I've seen all suck.

Re:Evolution not for everybody

[netgee]

What do studies say about someone who dismisses a (rather large) subset of the population as "not relevant" simply because of their personal beliefs?

A Small Reason to Switch, Gone

[digime]

Evolution, as is, is one of the few "killer apps" that promotes the adoption of Linux on the desktop at home and in businesses IMHO. From a corporation's perspective going from Outlook to Evolution as far as users are concerned is easy. It seems the developers are talking about coding away major similarities between Outlook and Evolution to make life easier for themselves, not to help the average user. And it definitely doesn't help with the transition to Linux. I think it's a real shame.

Windows port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, a decent Outlook replacement. Maybe I won't have to suffer with these OE bugs any more. And when I use Linux I can stay with the same client. Maybe I'll even switch my laptop to Linux if I can do that.

Er, nevermind, Ximian doesn't care about us Windows users.

Re:no spam filter?

[Libor Vanek]

But imagine how cool would be if you can through the Evolution interface give command to SpamAssassin that this message is spam (even if not marked so) and this (even marked as spam) isn't. This would make Bayesian learning much more user friendly.

Re:That's all this world needs.

[elmegil]

And where the hell did I say it was going to be open source? Or even released to anyone but me?

Re:Try KMail

[elmegil]

Um, KMail under Solaris GNOME? KMail on my windows machine at home? Don't think so.

Re:Tabs not buttons

[cpeterso]

Your mockup looks very nice. I agree that tabbed "views" seem better. Less screen real estate and they help visualize the data "views".

I used to work with one of the dev leads for Microsoft Outlook. If you think the Outlook UI is crowded or difficult now, you should hear the ideas that Outlook PMs proposed that were shot down! One proposal was similar to your tabbed mockup, but instead of one row of tabs along the top, there were THREE DIMENSIONS of tabs! There were tabs along the top, along the side, and along the bottom of the window! These different tab rows would interact in strange and "useful" ways to create new data views.

It's sad, really.. :-)

Usability research and testing

[c0d3h4x0r]

There is one problem with straying from the Outlook user interface: Evolution's developers will need to instead conduct their own usability research and testing, which can be costly and may not be something they are good at.

Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft, the fact is that they perform thorough usability research and testing on all their software. A frustrated individual may question or complain about the interface of Outlook, but that interface was methodically refined and evolved to meet the needs of the widest majority of users, not that one user's preferences.

The single biggest failing in Microsoft's approach to usability is overkill. They make everything far more complex than it needs to be. For instance, in nearly every Microsoft program there are at least 4 different ways to accomplish the same task (window menu, shortcut key, toolbar icon, context menu). Ridiculous, and more than your average person can (or wants to) wrap their brain around.

Personally, I don't think much research or rocket science is necessary to create a usable program. Just follow the KISS philosophy ("keep it simple, stupid") and you'll be 90% on the right track. The critical part is to test the design against as many real, average users as you can, and seriously incorporate their feedback into your design (even if it seems contrary to your personal feelings about how the program should work).

Or, put even more simply: Give people what they want, not what you want to give them.

LDAP support

[po_boy]

I wonder if they'll allow me to specify my LDAP contacts database as my default source with this new eye candy. Currently, I have to make new contacts in my own database and then move them to the LDAP server.

My 2 cents on Evolution

[bsands]

I really think evolution should try and keep a similar feel to Outlook at this stage. With Outlook so entrenched on the desktop; a similar feel is a great way to convince people to convert. My only criticism is Ximian is pricing their exchange connector way too high in my opinion. I would love to use Evolution to access my work email. However, at 69 bucks for a single user license there is little incentive to move away from Outlook; which so many have already paid for. If they considering pricing it around the 20 dollar range, maybe they would make up the difference on volume.

QT please...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope we will see a QT version of Ximian Evolution, because I don't like GTK2. All these different toolkits just make things look non-uniform throughout distros.

Don't laugh - I use pine

[gosand]

I gave up on Evolution when I tried the version that shipped with Red Hat 7.3. I also took one look at Kmail at the time and decided to pass. Mozilla Mail was overall faster, easier to configure, far less bulky, and part of the browser (lighter). It's spam filtering capability is also a must - as is it's security and presentation options. The only thing I liked about Evolution was the little configurable main page, where you could put in your favorate news-feeds or weather forecasts and what not. It also crashed harder then Outlook on a p133 with 16MB of RAM and Windows 98 First Edition.

I'd have no idea what Outlook was like if I wasn't forced to use it at work. The only thing I like about Outlook is the calendar portion of it. The rest is crap.

At home I use pine. Yeah, that pine. I have tried the following email clients: Kmail, Moz, Opera - yet I always come back to pine. While on vacation in Paris, I was able to pay a couple Euros at an internet cafe, download PuTTY, and check my email over ssh, all in about 2 minutes. No downloading of messages, and more importantly attachments. No worries about viruses or flashy garbage html. I do get some spam, but it is quick to delete and add to my own ruleset if I see a pattern. I use fetchmail to pull all of my various accounts into one place. I can even check it over a 56k when visiting my parents, and it isn't too slow.

The one drawback may be attachments, but if I am at home, I have applications set up to view those. If I am remote, I can always save them off and download them if I really need to via ftp or http.

For me, simplicity rules. For work, I can see why you would need some of the features - but for the most part, it is just fluffy packaging.