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

no spam filter?

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:no spam filter?

[dracvl]

One word.

POPFile.

You'll love it, I promise ;)

Re:no spam filter?

[aastanna]

Oh, I don't know. Apple's Mail.app has an integrated Baysian filter and it isn't hard to set up at all. One click to turn on training mode, then you just say "Spam" or "Not Spam" to every email that's identified incorrectly. When it stops making mistakes, one more click to go from training to actually filtering. Outlook is quite common on Windows boxes as a simple mail client, witness the popularity of spam viruses. If it wants to be an Outlook replacement how could it hurt to include such an excellent feature.

Outlook was bad anyway

[Ranx]

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.

Re:Outlook was bad anyway

[burns210]

"Even Microsoft has come to understand this: the upcoming Outlook will be quite different."

Ya, but acording to this screenshot... It may be a even WORSE user interface.

Outlook 2003

[ikewillis]

In Outlook 2003, Microsoft is also abandoning the current Outlook interface in favor of a "panes" driven interface.

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.

Re:Outlook 2003

[DigitalCH]

Been using it for about 9 months... Trust me it works great. Especially if you have a nice flatscreen. Between the improved look and feel and the "real" XML integration this is truly the first office upgrade thats worth it since office 97.

Move away from outlook

[ccano]

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...

Tabs not buttons

[Anonymous Coward]

This was posted to gnomedesktop.org last week.

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

Ximian Evolution

[harryk]

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

Roaming address books..

[Garion911]

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?

No S/MIME

[bivaughn]

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

Re:Evolution Screenshots cache / mirror of mockups

[Jordy]

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