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Evolution 1.5 has Been Released
SirPrize writes "As announced here, Evolution 1.5 is now available for download (obligatory screenshots, for those who want to click and see)" Congrats to all the developers responsible for this gigantic undertaking.
Screenshot 2
If you need a PIM to remind you to eat dinner, you have serious issues.
it truly is an Outlook killer
I'm not trying to troll here, as I think Evolution is a wonderful product... but I'd just like to dispute your claim on one of the finer points - nothing will be an "Outlook Killer" until it runs everywhere that Outlook runs (ie: Windows).
Is S/MIME support new for this release? I poked around on the site some and it looks like it is but I couldn't find any more information about it.
How are certificates and keys managed? Does it (hopefully) use a PKCS#11 module like Mozilla?
I don't know why more stuff doesn't use S/MIME early on. PGP/GPG and the others are not really standard and don't work off-the-shelf with a lot of big software (Mozilla and Outlook being two of them).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
How about at least mentioning what features are new?
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
You don't use Outlook enough. Ever had to run the scanpst.exe utility? When I hit the "Send/Receive" button in Outlook XP at the moment, I get a dialog saying "The operation failed". The other day I ran into a whole bunch of issues when one of my folders that mailing list messages filters to hit 64Ki messages.
I tried installing it just now. Their install program says it does not recognize my distribution .. and will not let me install
I am using Fedora Core 1
So is Evolution 1.5 a development release? Are they following the same numbering scheme as the Linux kernel? So does that mean that if I am not in a testing mood, I should rather wait for 1.6?
This is a development release. According to evolution's planned milestones, the stable 1.6 release will be out in March.
Like the kernel, the odd dot releases are development.
That said, I choose to use evolution 1.4 for most of my email needs.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
This is one of the Evolution testing releases that go along with Gnome 2.5. The goal is a stable Evolution 2.0 and Gnome 2.6 later in the spring. Check out he roadmap.
So by all means, pick up 1.5 if you want to help with bug fixing, but this is not a "stable" release.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of Evolution and why it may be impossible to run on Windows, but I think that if it were possible, it would be a large boon to the project.
Is there ANY way to try out the Ximian Connector before buying it? I can't convince my company to buy it for me, even though I'm on a Linux workstation running all of the *nix boxes in house. (I run rdesktop to connect to a win box to check my email via Outlook - which is a waste). I want to try it, and would gladly buy it myself if I thought it worked fine. Or, can anyone testify to it's usefulness? Evoltion has come such a long way in the past year, I really want to start using that fulltime.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
Evolution is truly a first class application. Polished, debugged, good-looking, and professional.
... but where's the built-in support for remote calendars using an open protocol? Folks like me who are developing open source groupware servers are anxiously awaiting good clientware to connect to. How about putting WCAP in the standard build? It's well-documented and much simpler than the disgusting mess the IETF is proposing (CAP has the dubious honor of being the one protocol even uglier than IMAP).
That having been said, though, I am still disappointed by the fact that they are not supporting remote calendars out of the box. Sure, you can buy plugins to connect it to Exchange, or Netscape/iPlanet/SunONE/JES calendar server (whatever they're calling it this week), and presumably Groupwise (soon)
So how about it, codemonkeys? The sooner we get some real open source calendaring going, the sooner we can start to make a real challenge to Outlook. Microsoft loves the Outlook/Exchange lock-in. They love it so much that they're trying to do the same thing across their entire product line (Office 2003 has many ties to SharePoint server). The window of opportunity is open, but it won't be forever.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
calenders
mail
tasks
Anyone know when that is going to be added. I remember seeing some posts about getting started on it on the developer mailing list after 1.4 was released, but I don't see mention of it.
What the fuck is "evolution"?
Apparently something your murky area of the genetic pond stopped doing generations ago.
Trolling is a art,
Evolution will (shortly) be a very capable PIM. With an OS backend of somekind for scheduling, will cover 95% of the "outlook" users needs. But, Outlook does something that no GNU/Linux PIM does yet these form things.
Now, Im not trying to say "outlook r0x0r2 and evolution 6r00l2" or somesuch, so please ease up on the "M$ shill" retorts (and the 'outlook is insecure' w/ vb" stuff as well.
What you can do is send forms, with send a form to a user like an email -- the 'form' appears in their inbox). This form, can do whatever you'd like. You can build work-chain dependant systems with them.
Now, I imagine you can do similar via HTML forms and a Apache backend, but ive used these outlook forms before to enable some 'officialdom' instead of attached emails and forms.... and they worked pretty nice. (i built a simple form that made 'offical' communication between two departments and tracked the sending/recieving and reaction -- pretty simple) its pretty interesting.
http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/
In my opinion, borrowing ideas like that for a groupware/email client would be what distinguishes Evolution from the competition.
Oh, and pretty please make a Winders version for those of us that are stuck here? :)
You've never supported Outlook for others, I take it? It does several weird things with POP3. Take, for instance, this recent problem I've been having where Outlook thinks that a messages is 48KB in size when in fact it's only 46KB. It downloads the 46KB, doesn't get any more for that message, tries again, and again, and again, until it chokes and dies. This one guy had 500Megs of that one message in his inbox, and it never even got removed from the server (neither did anything past it). This is probably the POP server's "fault" (they use Post.Office... *shudder*), but the MDA should definitely be able to handle a fault like that.
Anyways, I'm not bashing Outlook in particular (I think on the whole the Office line is Microsoft's best work), I just find it odd that people are totally used to the bugs in Microsoft programs but think that equally annoying but different bugs somehow bar Linux from the desktop.
All's true that is mistrusted
*cough* connector *cough*
Since the article makes this totally,totally unclear, this is not a stable release. It's a totally devel, in many ways broken, release. Could eat your mail, pets, family, etc. So only download/install if you are brave. Or stupid. Or something. The stable release will go out with GNOME 2.6 in the spring, or at least that is the current plan. Hope that clarifies...
IAAL,BIANLY
Does anyone know if there are plans to add built-in spam filtering like Mozilla has? Right now everyone says to use spamassassin but that doesn't work for some people that I know that user Evolution. They want something built in to the client end.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
The real question I have for the developers is this: when will we ever see decent PGP/GPG support for Evolution? It's hand-down the most feature complete email app available for GNU/Linux, and yet, still can't do PGP even half as good as Pine, Kmail, Enigmail. The only time I get a PGP'ed email that I can read is ONLY if it was sent by another evolution client, which sounds more like the behavior I would expect from LookOut. Hell, the only way I've gotten decent GPG support for Evo is to have Pine reading a folder where I filter encrypted messages into, Pine reads them just fine, Evolution can't. I've looked through all the features that will supposedly be in the 2.0 release, and nowhere is there mentioned any fix of the PGP handling. I don't pretend to know more than the developers, and I'm sure there may be reasons why they've chosen to leave this feature broken, but if every other OSS Email project can nail it, why can't they?
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
one of the things i've noticed with the (dear me) evolution of Evolution is that when it originally reared its head it was almost a complete copy of Outlook from a UI point of view.
the version that comes with XD2 seems to have begun a move away from Outlook. and i'm debating in my mind if this is a good thing or not. surely the "switch"-like campaign would favour apps that looked and behaved more like MS apps for the sake of familiarity when moving across to a new environment. obviously the bad side of this is the whole innovation-stiffling argument that if one just mimicks Microsoft behaviour, what benefit other than cost is being added?
anyway, i would be in a better position to speak once actually having given it a test - but the UI on those screenshots seems a lot LESS intuitive than i've seen in previous releases. a few examples:
Calendar
it may seem obvious to a geek, but what is "Local"? and how does that differ from "On This Computer" in the tasks screenshot? also, what the heck is the "Component" button at the bottom there? and why do the buttons at the bottom there look so ugle. the ones on Tasks have icons, those don't. basically inconsistent UI.
i understand that this is a dev. release, but it seems silly to me to ignore UI in a odd release while developing the functionality and then maybe coming back to it in the following release. the way a user interacts with software should be considered throughout a development cycle as interaction changes can often lead to large programming changes.
Try using MultiSync with the SynCE plugin.
I think the most important feature that is currently missing is the spam filtering. Everyone else has it, why doesn't evolution? Use the code from mozilla if you have to.
wish I had the time to do it myself.
-jj-
Email their support and they'll send you a 30 day trial key.
I personally use it to connect to our Exchange 2003 server and it works quite well. Your company's Exchange server will need OWA support enabled however.
Thunderbird has many things going for it as a pure email/nntp app that Evolution doesn't (yet). .
1) Spam controls need to be built into Evolution.
2) Customizable icons. Evolution's UI is too big and wastes desktop space. It also looks a bit too Gnome 1.4 . .
3) Threaded messages don't work particularly well.
4) Pilot syncing is hit or miss for most people (I've gotten it working in the past, but not since 1.2).
5) IMAP controls are a bit weird. Either you empty your trash upon exit, or messages marked for deletion stay that way until you do so. Thunderbird is more intuitive, allowing the DEL key to move messages to the Trash folder.
6) Consistency on each platform. It's nice having the same mail app on Windows, Mac linux and PC linux.
The big plus for Evolution is the groupware features, which I never use. It has a nice calendar as well. Better integration with the Gnome desktop would be nice.
As usual, Evolution's team is doing it right, including the version numbering. We can all learn by their good example.
FTA:
"note that there are still some bugs migrating data from 1.4.x to 1.5 and that 1.5 stores its information in ~/.evolution rather than ~/evolution/ so that if you add new info in 1.5 in will not show up in 1.4.x."
Version numbers should reflect the features and requirements of the software they describe. When I worked for Apple, we recognized that software compatibility depended on both data formats/protocols and user interfaces. MAJOR.minor.revision(.patch/build) numbers reflected interoperability: Adding features, either to the GUI or functionality, that the user could notice, incremented the MAJOR number. Changing data/protocol formats, in the filesystem, over the network, or otherwise (any I/O, like sensors), incremented the minor number. Revision numbers reflected internal changes interesting only to developers, likewise any patch or build numbers. Forward/backward compatibility becomes just another feature/requirement, a special case of any given version, never to be expected unless explicitly included.
With that simple scheme, we could tell whether a version wouldn't interoperate with other software in a suite, or might require retraining (eg, glance at documentation) to use. Or fixed a bug. With those rules, we defended rational version numbering in favor of users (and developers) - defended from the insane ravages of marketdroids who were locked in a version numbering "arms race" with the competition.
--
make install -not war