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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?"
Quickly checked their feature list. No automatic spam filter [as in Mozilla].
No sale. I live off that moz filter [since it catches basically all spam I get].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Mozilla Mail
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
The Outlook interface was bad anyway. I can understand making an UNIX-version of Outlook to make it easier for Windows-users to migrate to UNIX, but from an usability standpoint, it's unbelievable.
Even Microsoft has come to understand this: the upcoming Outlook will be quite different.
Me
Time to lose Outlook and bring on the new users! Is there a Windows version of Evolution?
What do you think about a maturing Evolution that goes its own way and leaves the Outlook-like interface behind?"
/.ed though I'm hoping it will be nice :) My main concern is whether they'll get any kind of automatic address completion like there is in Eudora or the Mozilla address bar, contacts are nice but a bit of a pain to set up and they're still not as nice as autocompletion.
Not much since the site is
I stole this Sig
Looking at these screen shots, Ximian has opted for a toolbar-driven approach. This seems like a reasonable way to go, considering that it's a methodology familiar to the majority of computer users.
I think any frequent user of Outlook learned to despise the side navbar. I'm glad that both Evolution and Outlook 2003 will be abandoning it.
The calendar views in Outlook and Evolution are horrible. It's hard to distinguish the demarcations between months/weeks etc, and it's just very non-user friendly IMHO.
My current hopes and dreams are on a often-forgotten Mozilla Calendar, which I'm hoping will find the attention of hte masses and get that last-mile work it so desperately needs to become my permanent calendar...
I mean think about it, to REPLACE the outlook interface, you need to offer an alternative that is not only stronger, better and faster, but one that the computer illiterate (and marginally literate) will use. If you think about it, we are still the minority and are as happy with ximian as mutt, but can we assume the same of 99% of the user base? Absolutely not!!! We need to get them addicted to our interface with transparent innovations before we go to the visible (and potentially intimidating) ones.
In most dev classes, aren't we taught to automate the existing business practices before changing them? The whole thing is an evolution... but evolution is evolving too fast in this case.
I did a quick mockup of what this would look like with tabs instead of buttons.
Some of the reasons for using tabs instead of buttons:
- Custom tabs - User can create new tabs for access to frequently used views (replaces the shortcuts)
- Tabs can be renamed - Allows user to specify a name that is more meaningful to them
- Tabs can be dragged - If Anjuta2 style containers are used tags can be dragged to be reordered or even dragged off the shell into it's own application window.
- Less screen area waisted - tabs allow clean navigation without resorting to taking up a chunk of UI
--J5
This url for those of you who couldn't make the above url work.
Will be great for moving people away from MS desktops. Coupled with Abiword or even OpenOffice is really giving me goosebumps.
One way that I'm encouraged by alot of the desktop push is by companies (some) moving to browser based applications. The company that I work for is developing their next application to be completely browser based. While this is no big deal, the interesting part, is that it 'should' work well with mozilla, thus paving the way for full linux desktops. NICE
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
Has anyone ported this to Win32 or Cygwin yet?
Just saying "linux 9" reminds me of working on a helpdesk. Someone would call and you would ask them what OS they were running and they would just "windows". "Well, what version of windows?" "I don't know, is says start in the corner" (keep in mind that this was at a company that ran every version from 95 to XP).
I can understand common users that don't know the differenc between 95 and NT, but I've had, on several occasions, IT people tell me "Hey, I installed linux 9,8,whatever on my computer last night!"
I haven't researched it recently, but what would be a kinda killer app for me is roaming addressbooks... From what I read, older versions of Netscape had this feature, but no one supports it now..
I would really like to be able to sync my palm, and have the email address available on my web-email.. Or on my GUI email client (Sylpheed).. Or in OpenOffice..
Yes, LDAP will do alot of that, but I would also like per user.. I want my own roaming addressbook, and my girlfriend can have her own.. ANd being able to have a global addressbook would be bonus..
Is there anything else out there, besides Netscape Roaming, and is supported by a few email clients?
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
I'm really hoping that multiple calendars makes it into the next realease. This is one feature that I've wanted for a long time and have never had the time to code in myself. I guess time will tell. Thanks to those of you who work on evolution, it's a great product.
I think it's great that they are moving it beyond being an Outlook-alike.
Agreed. IANALU (Linux User), but one of my biggest complaints about Linux software in general has been its inevitable tendency to imitate Microsoft's graphical interface first, and Apple's second. Anytime a project like Evolution or Mozilla is able to break rank and develop its own interface, it's a Good Thing, because it proves the software is mature enough to improve on someone else's interface design.
Who are these informed fundamentalist Christians of which you speak?
Sick of people knocking on Gentoo's greatness in completely unrelated
In short, it's a LOT of work. So much work, in fact, that the investment probably wouldn't be easily recouped. As many places are upgrading anyway, I can see why they don't want to support it.
OTOH it is open source. Perhaps once Wine gets full DCOM support, it will be possible. But by the time that happens, truly nobody will use Exchange 5.5 any more at all :(
Evolution/Connector would certainly be a killer app for me and allow me to move away from Windows/Outlook, but without S/MIME support, it's a no-go. Lots of financial institutions are moving to S/MIME as well, not just computer firms like mine. Come on X guys, give us something more standardized than GPG!
-biv
As I said in another thread. This interface is *very* similar to Microsoft Entourage. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but Entourage does a few other nice things to refine it a bit. Some screen shots of Entourage:
Address Book w/ small buttons
Mail
Calendar
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
I was very disappointed in the result of the Ogo project. What started out as the Outlook/Exchange killer ended up being just another "sure I'm free except to make me work you have to buy a license" project. I think the Open Source community need to band together and start from the ground up on a new cross-platform email client and server that is standards based and has all the functionality of an Exchange setup. I can't program, but I'd be willing to organize and manage if there is interest by programmers out there to join such a project. I think a good Exchange replacement would use IMAP for it's communication protocol, MySQL for the backend message store, and some good coding and user interface testing with plenty of documentation for a start. Ideally I think a good PIM should be an all-in-one app like Outlook, but the UI could be done a lot better. Managing multiple apps from a systems admin point of view can be hell when they all have their own little quirks.
It does look exactly like my mail client. It's called KMail: http://kmail.kde.org/art/screenshot_main.png Nice to see they caught up :)
The memos piece has been missing forever. Can't display memos synced from PDA. That's one Outlook feature I used heavily.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.