Srini

I released Evolution 2.12 with GNOME 2.20. This is my first release as the maintainer for Evolution. Some interesting things we did for Evolution 2.12 follows

Spam Improvements

• New bogofilter spam plugin
• Spam plugins (bogofilter/spamassasin) can now learn ham
• Spams don’t initiate new mail notifications
• and…

UI Improvements

• Basic contact merging support.
• Improved search support for Calendar and Tasks

  • New advanced search and better quick search options

• Better printing support for mailer
• Magic space bar support - Read all the unread mails in all folders with just space bar key
• Message selection improvements
• More options for offline support
• New –disable-preview command line option to avoid repeated crash on last selected email
• Option for Outlook style signature on top - more details here
• Option for Outlook style reply header
• Spinner in the status bar
• Support for multimedia keys
• Support for showing contact photos in preview pane
• Thread sorting based on the date of the latest message

Performance Improvements

• Addressbook improvements from DBus port branch
• EContact/VCard folding optimizations
• Huge Exchange folder loading optimizations

New Plugins

• Bogofilter spam plugin
• Attachment reminder plugin

• Mail notification plugin

• TNEF attachment plugins (Experimental)
• Revamped backup/restore plugin

Lots of Exchange/GroupWise performance/stability fixes went in 2.12 release. We had a special focus on stability in 2.12 cycle and Evolution has nearly 100 crashers fixed and in total 450 bugs were fixed during the 2.12 cycle. Now we are preparing a planning page for the next cycle here. Feel free to add your thoughts to the planning page.

Thanks a lot for the contributors and we are looking forward for the next release.

Evolution’s goals (camel) are definitely different from Tinymail’s goal (camel-lite). You definitely can’t substitute each other in all places. Users wont be happy to use a email client that doesn’t even support message threading on a desktop. Philip posted an overview camel-lite onto the evolution-hackers list some time back. Camel-lite has a lot of things that can be merged with upstream camel like pop summary, some IMAP improvements (non-hacky stuffs). I’m sure that the discussion is ON between Varadhan and Philip to get the pop summary into trunk for early 2.14 cycle and more merging of useful things down the time. But I won’t / don’t think Evolution would move away from camel to camel-lite any time.

Update: I just saw that Sankar (who maintains EPlugins) has posted a nice blog about Evolution/Camel/Camel-lite. Though I don’t agree to all the points, some interesting differences and goals.

It is really nice to be at GUADEC and see the ever busy GNOME hackers

I had my talk first in the morning. Guenther saved me from my Magic Spacebar demo failure. (Caret mode was ON) It went pretty good otherwise. Unfortunately there was no recording as I have heard before.

I had a nice chat with the audience after the talk. Nice to see the Evolution hackers from China.

Lucian is doing a Evolution plugin for feeds with RSS, RDF and ATOM support. He just made 0.4 release.

Check out his site for more.

Milan Crha and Øystein Gisnås are doing an awesome patch for Evolution/EDS which improves add / get contact apis from 37 seconds to 0.15 second. This is gonna rock performance of contacts with images. Great work guys!

Evolution got 3 Google summer of code projects.

     Google Calendar backend for EDS/Evolution
      by Ebby Wiselyn, mentored by Harish Krishnaswamy
     Evolution Message Threading Improvements
      by Tobias Mueller, mentored by Sven Herzberg
     Evolution/Seahorse Integration
     by Pınar Yanardağ, mentored by Raphael Slinckx

A BIG thanks to all the mentors and students and all the very best to Ebby, Tobias Mueller and Pınar Yanardağ.

behdad, I guess, dobey’s comments explains the feature. IIRC OpenOffice.org, Firefox too has the same concept like evolution. IMO It may not be fair to compare this with tabs in gedit. I agree with the shortcuts stuff, which should to be addressed in some way. We are working on configurable shortcuts which should help address such issues. It was supposed to be in 2.8, but didnt make it. It should be part of next release, as I have described in the FUTURE section in my earlier blog

- HIG states, dont change the tool button labels. That is one reason, why “Delete” / “Undelete” and “Junk” / “Not Junk” cant be merged.
There was some proposal to make spam assasin learn as ham (Not a spam). Both Junk and Not_Junk button has to be present for that. Atleast It was merged in early 2.14 cycle and reverted for above reasons.

- “Delete” option in context menu for a deleted message was a due to bug 254770 You can reopen and put down your views there

- I strongly agree to the jumping message selection in threaded view. Please file a bug, and put down your expectation, we would be happy to fix it.

One big reason, I hate to use threading is that my reading is limited to the mails I received TODAY/RECENTLY. If a new message arrives in a old thread, it still lies way below the scrolled window and never comes to my visibility. I really like GMail at this very point and I tried to get something like this into Evolution, to improve threading usage. I got some good results.

If the message is in a collapsed state, the date of the THREAD, I compute to be the date of latest message received in that thread.

which brings the message on to the top to get the attention. If you expand, it appears like this.

If the message is in expanded state during sorting (List generation), then it takes the date of its creation, which puts it back to the original place.

Once in a day, I can use View/Collapse All and see are there any new messages to a old thread.

Four months, in GNOME 2.16 cycle, We have added a lot of UI improvements to Evolution to make it look much better. Not just features and lot of bug fixes too!!! I have blogged them in parts. Im summarising all of them.

Cairo Rendering for Calendar

Evolution Calendar takes direct advantage of Cairo. It enabled us to make calendar much appealing. Now calendar features the following features

- The entire calendar, day/month view is drawn using Cairo.
- The selected event is shown with a shadow.

- When u re-size the event, you can see the end time shown in
the bottom of the event.
- The tag calendar has been moved to the left. Users can select the day on the left and see the events on the right

- There is a top header in every event that displays the start
time of the event.

Vertical View in Mailer

- Dynamic switch to Vertical view for Wide screen monitors
- Composite columns, which merges few of the most used columns
in to a 2 line column, so that the user has a extra width to
have a reasonable width for the preview. Automatic switching to
this view on vertical view mode.
- Right click to sort on hidden columns.
- Ability to custom short the number of emails displayed in
headers in the message preview/view with a option to expand.

Search

- Quick Search bar: It features some of the most used
predefined instant apply criteria on the mail list.

- One interface to search for all mails in current
folder/account/all accounts and current mail.
- For current message, it uses no pop up dialog for search
widgets.
- Implements All account search. Don’t have to hack around with VFolders to search :).

There were a lot of UI bug fixes. You wont see the shading over NEW button any more and It follows the gconf setting for toolbar buttons. The comma deletion in NameSelector is no more over smart and just works as expected and a lot more fixes.

Future

A lot of other works have started like

- Split UI
Load the bonobo component of just one module, when started
with a command line option or so. It reduces the preferences
options, menu size and to some extent memory. (Ex. You open
calendar and mail. Just See your calendar and close it, it is
off your memory) It has few missing bits like plugin support
and other logistics. It should be ready for the next
release (Hope so :). This model allows Evolution to run as a Suite as
well as in split mode. I have demoed this during my GUADEC talk.
- Toolbar/Shortcut Editor (Pretty lame implementation, due to the
limitation of libbonoboui)

- HTML Composer for Calendar/Tasks/Memo