We’ve released Geary 0.8 and Shotwell 0.20 today and I’m pretty excited about getting these out the door to our users. Both releases include important fixes and some great new features.
Geary 0.8
While Geary 0.8 has a slew of new features and improvements, I would say the most visible for our users (compared to 0.6) are the following:
- Robert Schroll’s redesign of the mail composer. Not only does it look a lot sharper and more modern than before, it also operates inline in the main window—that is, you type your reply right below the email you’re responding to. This means replying to a conversation is a more natural operation than opening a separate window or switching to a new view. You can still pop the composer out into a separate window, just press the Detach button and you’re on your way.
- Gustavo Rubio’s hard work to get signature support into Geary. Now Geary will automatically insert a signature of your design into an email, whether new or replying to another. This is one of the most-requested features for Geary, so it’s good to get this in.
- I’ve put in some hard work on improving database speed and IMAP connection stability. There’s still a couple of kinks here and there, but I feel like 0.8 is a big step forward in making Geary the kind of application you can leave on for days at a time without worrying about it slowing down, crashing, or losing its connection to the server.
In other words, if you’re a Geary user, you really should upgrade.
That said, here’s a more formal list of improvements:
- Major redesign of email composer, now presented inline in main window
- Composer will automatically add signature to emails
- Saving drafts to server can be disabled
- Improved interface, now using GtkHeaderBar and modern widgets
- Database speed optimizations to reduce lags and improve read times
- Improved connection handling and reestablishment
- Show attachments lacking a Content-Disposition
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Important bug fixes
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Updated translations
The tarball for Geary 0.8 is available here. Visit the Geary home page for more information.
Shotwell 0.20
Shotwell 0.20 has a more modest set of improvements, but it’s still growing and developing. In particular, new photo sharing plugins were added and stability fixes have been included:
- Support for Rajce.net and Gallery 3 photo services
- Set background image for lock screen
- Better detection of corrupt images during import
- Important stability bug fixes
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Updated translations
The tarball for Shotwell 0.20 is available here. Visit the Shotwell home page for more information.
Thank you so much. I use shotwell daily. Is there any plan for redesigning UI ? Current UI have bad looking search bar, non-monochrome icon ( Font Avesome instead ?) and does not follow GNOME 3 HIG.
Perhaps you would be interested in elementary’s Pantheon Photos, which is a fork of Shotwell that includes a number of UI clean ups (however, where elementary HIG and GNOME HIG differ, it favors elementary).
The new Geary is great. The UI is really sleek. Thanks to all the devs.
Great! Geary with headerbar is fantastic and so is the integrated reply functionality.
One bug I seem to be running into with the integrated reply functionality though, is that the text body doesnt expand when the e-mail field is expanded (expanded by pressing the e-mail adress to reveal CC and BCC fields).
otherwise I’m very pleased with the release so far. 🙂
Great work, but…
when will we compose in markdown? haha, just joking. This looks like an awesome release.
A welcome set of changes, especially the signature support, which prevented me from being able to use Geary on a daily basis. Many thanks for the continued development.
I’ve tried using an earlier development release of Geary after I noticed signature support in the change log, but it wasn’t clear to me how one should actually apply a signature. There’s no mention anywhere on how to do it on any site. Has there been a GUI update since the first dev release with signature support?
If not, would it be possible to somehow enlighten the users on how to actually use this feature?
You can set the signature in the account settings window.
Geary 0.8 doesn’t work well with Gtk 3.14 on ArchLinux. It was perfect with 3.12, but after the Gtk update the UI is now empty.
This is fixed in master. We’ll be releasing an 0.8.1 shortly that corrects this problem.
0.8.1 still doesn’t work properly. Even after removing ~/.local/share/geary and setting up everything again it’s still blank. I can see the 3 columns, but there is no account in the first column.
Geary still not working on Arch after gnome update. The git and dev packages start-up, but dont send/recieve mail.
The IM viber has the same problem.
Other than the temp bug, geary is a great little program.
geary 0.8.1-2 just released on Arch.
Now opens normally, but still cant receive emails 🙁
…installed xfce4 and its working again.
Logged out of xfce4 and into gnome again – and it still worked !
Dont know, dont care – just very happy again 🙂
I had the same problem and it was fixed with the 2nd package release. I don’t know what happened but I’m glad it works 🙂
The UI could use some polish – the accounts treeview and the message list have an extra unnecessary border (when using the default theme) and there’s so much wasted space for just a throbber/statusbar under the accounts treeview.
When will we have the face recognition into shotwell ?
Hi Jim,
Where is the best place to request a new functionality for Shotwell? A guy created a script to sync photos to flickr (http://blog.altlimit.com/2013/05/backupsync-your-photos-to-flickr-script.html), and it would be nice to have that incorporated as a plugin. With some help, I could myself try to do it… someone?
Happy 2015
A ticket exists for offering synchronize (rather than a push or publish model) with Web services: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=716747 That would be a good place to discuss further.