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News From The Evolution Front
An anonymous reader writes "Sun's Java System Calendar Server connector (Hydrogen) for Evolution 1.4 on Solaris and Linux was GPL'ed today and is now available in GNOME CVS. This follows the recent GPLization of Novell's Ximian Connector (for Microsoft Exchange servers). In related news, the next major version of Evolution (version 2.0) is supposed to be released sometime during the next month, and beta testing have picked up pace. If you have some spare time, you can also give the Evolution 1.5.9 a spin. You can also use jhbuild to build Evolution from CVS (since the binaries are quite old by now). There is also a new project in GNOME CVS, called Evolution Brainread which adds a blog viewer to Evolution. It is not yet quite ready for production use, but looks quite good."
Nat remarked in a recent interview that Evo 2 would depend on Mono. Did I understand correctly?
Evolution Brainread which adds a blog viewer to Evolution. It is not yet quite ready for production use, but looks quite good."
I can't wait until the time i'm asked to put "Blog Viewers" in "Production Use" ...
The world will have changed a whole lot by the times this happens !!
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
I haven't used Evolution in ages (mostly because I'm generally not on a linux desktop). Has anyone contemplated (succeeded?) in generating a Windows or Mac version?
I'm trying to "standardize" on Thunderbird at home (fairly featurful, stable, and very cross-platform compatible). As Sunbird matures, that helps solve some of the calendar problems. But I'm not sure there's a good Addressbook app, or ToDo app, in the Mozilla world. Has anyone begun thinking about a Mozilla alternative to Evolution / Outlook, that (potentially) merges separate apps under an outlook-like front end?
Note, of course, that this still overlooks some of the back-end problems (IMAP's great for mail, but getting LDAP pervasively distributed and configured is something of a challenge) (and I'm not sure it's the best DB for user-centric Address/Phone books). But if I can get a unified front-end that'll run on all the desktops in the house, then I'll deal with the data issues later (hell, I'll just use shared folders if I have to).
Where in the windows version? It would help in the first stages of getting people off windows.
I now only use GMail, I never was able to really get Evolution to work for me. Seemed like a lot of extra stuff that I didn't need, and the search is nothing to GMail.
I also like the lable system better than the folder system.
That being said, I will invite the next 3 people to respond to this post.
invite me linuxw1z@hotmail.com
I'll take you up on that...
Burritoj@hotmail.com
Me me me!!!
chris_mahan@yahoo.com
"Piter, too, is dead."
ok, one left.
you gotta at least have username, i.e. no AC's.
how about ubergeek28@yahoo.com?
who, me? where? with who?
.. of some sort?
I am thinking something as simple and easy to use as Mozilla Mail / Thunderbird.
I could not find anything. Seems like a must-have for such a powerful app.
Is it me or does pasting current selection with the middle mouse button not work in evolution? This makes it unusable for me.
I'm sorry that Evolution isn't cross-platform. It's nice to have applications that can work on both Windows and Linux, both from a practical point of view (Windows client is unavoidable) and because it is useful for transitioning people to Linux.
I agree with Miguel's idea that the whole Gnome should become cross-platform and be partially integrated with Mozilla. I've seen many GTK+ apps that run really well and look quite good on Windows (eg. Gaim, AbiWord).
carrp_x@yahoo.com
thanks!
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
However, Java is becoming more viable for GNOME
I seriously question that statement, since GNOME is supposed to be free software, and Java (at least, Sun's version) is not free software. I don't have java installed, nor am I even quite sure how to install java on my Debian system, since Sun's licensing forced Debian to remove java even from their non-free archives! There is kaffe (and gjc), but those aren't quite there yet.
How this will all play out, I'm not sure. Obviously, since you are closer to the Sun side, you see the forces pushing java as strong; I'm closer to the Debian side, so I see the forces opposing java as strong. The GNOME project as a whole is somewhere in the middle, though, and I'm not sure either one of us has the perspective to see where things will actually end up. Mono seems to have more active development than kaffe, but if kaffe development picks up, maybe that will balance things out and give java/kaffe the inside edge in GNOME. Or maybe Sun will come to their senses and license Java under a non-stupid license. We'll see.
Good question -- and is this spam filter as easy to use as Mozilla Mail or Thunderbird's spam filtering?
I appreciate the programmatic advantages of modular code and programs doing one thing and doing them well, but I also appreciate integration (or even the appearance of integration) that makes it trivially easy to use advanced functionality. I've been programming and using computers for decades. As I get older and less tolerant of bad user interfaces, I place more importance on the latter.
Digital Citizen
sorry, you got beat.
It fixed a bug I had on 1.5.5 where if you have "Load images if sender is in address book" turned on, some spam would cause the preview pane to freeze.
I also haven't seen the problems with IMAP that I had with 1.4.5 in a long time. Many thanks to Ximian for fixing this.
For Fedora Core 2 users, get it via yum from Dave Malcolm's repo.
Yes MSVC++ should not even be called c++. Not to mention that I have lost count of all the differnt flavors of "strings".
Ansi C++ has gotten much better but the STL is still lacking the a hashmap and a hashmultimap. Options for using garbage collection with C++ should be made standard as well.
I have not played with c# but I do feel that java has a lot going for it. For one thing it as a base object class. That is so helpful and almost removes the need for templates. I am not fond of the the speed of Swing but the api is much better than say MFC. I have also found treading under java to be a piece of cake.
Yes the slow start up time of java apps is a pain as is the lack of speed of swing and the non-native widgets. BTW try Swing under MacOS/X sometime it is fast and pretty. Java is a good choice for internal Apps at least for my company.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In almost all cases, maybe 95%, there is a real reason to catch a checked exception. Not catching the exception is an error, and should be flagged as such by the compiler.
For example, in C after calling certain functions (IO functions for example) you must check the return code for errors and act on it. Too often have I seen people only checking the return code from the open() but not from the subequent read() for example. Having these methods throw a checked IOException is a very good things, because it makes you deal with the error.
Just because handing errors is freaking boring doesn't mean you don't have to.
Also, there are RuntimeExceptions which doesn't need to be caught.
There is a very simple rule of thumb that should be used when deciding wether to use a checked exception or a RuntimeException: If the potential exception can be thrown from a perfectly bug-free program, then it should be checked. For example: A perfectly correct program without a single bug can still receieve an IOException when reading from a file, because its out of the applications control. Obviously this must be a checked exception.
On the other hand, a NullPointerException is unchecked because it is possible to write the code in such a way that you are guaranteed that they are never thrown.
Now, this rule does not always work perfectly and at times like that it can be a bit painful. For example, InputStream.read() is declared to throw IOException. However, this means that you need to deal with IOException even when reading from a ByteArrayInputStream. These cases doesn't come up that often (if it does to you, you really should think about the quality of the code you are writing) and in the case when it does, it can be wrapped in a simple:
Another annoying quirk is why Integer.parseInt() is declared to throw an unchecked NumberFormatException while NumberFormat.parse() is declared to throw the checked ParseException?