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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.
Now that is evolved.
It's OK, Slashdot has done a remarkable job of censoring anything that I have been trying to see.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Although Evolution is comparable to Outlook in many ways, it is not for everybody. Take fundamental Christians, for example. To them, Evolution doesn't exist. :)
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've been using Evolution for the past couple years and I'm giving some thought to making the move back to Kmail or even to ..gulp... Mozilla for my email client because Evolution is just butt slow. Butt slow. I'm using version 1.2 that comes with Linux 9.0 and it's slow. I really hope they are working on optimizing the code as well as making it look good because as it stands now you're not going to wow anyone who is using Outlook (which isn't blazing fast by any means) into switching.
All the best,
--Bob
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
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.
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...
If you're willing to go for one more word, you could actually sound intelligent. How about, "Mozilla doesn't have a calendar," instead? Also, since it's irrelevant (and impossible?) for Mozilla to have or be a machine in which cloth or paper is made smooth and glossy by being pressed through rollers, I fixed your misspelling of "calendar".
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
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
Mozilla.org hosts a Calendar project. It can be found here. Although still in development and a bit buggy, it includes the basic functionality. I have been using it for a couple of months now.
Currently, I think the Calendar only supports Mozilla. I am not sure what will be done (if any?) to support Firebird/Thunderbird. I hope that it will be a standalone project like the new browser and mail client.
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.
When evolution supports multibyte characters - that's when it will surpass outlook. Seriously - I use Japanese and English email and as soon as I tried migrating to Evolution all my email just &#"%"#%\'"&#%\%"'&%!>('$
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
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.
I just resolved today that I *am* going to get around to writing my own email client after the bloody thing stopped working...
Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
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
Although still in development and a bit buggy, it includes the basic functionality. I have been using it for a couple of months now.
;)
You were right about the buggy bit, it's only the 14th you know; you've been using it for two WEEKS not months...
... I guess
Calendar
Tasks
Mail
Contacts
Shrunken Navbar
I have a mirror / cache of the mockup screenshots. Not all of them are up there yet but I'll put them up as soon as I get them
evo2_contacts.png
evo2_calendar.png
evo2_mail.png
evo2_tasks.png
evo2_navbar_shrunk.png
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