Announcing Geary 0.4.3

geary-yorbaYorba has released Geary 0.4.3, an update of our IMAP email client.  This update features two fixes:

* Fix “squished” conversation list when used with certain themes
* Compile-time support for WebKitGTK 2.0

In particular, the first problem affects users of Mint 16 Cinnamon.  Those users should upgrade to Geary 0.4.3 to avoid this display problem.

The tarball for the Geary 0.4.3 is available at https://download.gnome.org/sources/geary/0.4/geary-0.4.3.tar.xz

Ubuntu users (including Mint) can install the upgrade at Yorba’s PPA.  Note that neither of the above problems should affect users of the recent 0.4 backport to Precise/Luna.

Geary 0.4.2 backport for Precise 12.04 / Luna now available

geary-yorbaLast month I announced Yorba was sponsoring a $500 bounty to backport Geary 0.4 to Precise Pangolin 12.04 and elementary’s Luna.  I’m pleased to announce two new developments toward that goal.

First, since then six forward-thinking people added another $100 to the bounty, making the total pot $600.  Thank you!  This was the part of the experiment I was most interested in.  Backporting Geary to 12.04 was a highly-requested task, and I wondered if the people who wanted it would be willing to contribute a little money toward that goal.  At least some people did think it worthwhile enough, and collectively they added 20% to Yorba’s initial offer.

Second, I’m pleased to announce that the goal has been reached.  Tom Beckmann put in a lot of hours and considerable blood, sweat, and tears to port Geary back to 12.04, but he did it and so he claims the bounty.  I’ve run his version of Geary on both Precise and elementary Luna and am quite impressed.  It uses our new symbolic icon layout, it’s integrated with Precise’s message indicator, and offers every feature in Geary 0.4, including full-text search and the stability improvements we added to 0.4.1.  Best of all, he packaged it up on a Launchpad PPA, meaning it’s a snap to install.

If you’re running Precise Pangolin 12.04 or elementary Luna and you’d like to upgrade your version of Geary, I recommend the following directions.  Open a terminal window and type the following:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tombeckmann/geary
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install geary

If you’re already running Geary 0.3.1, this new version will update your old database and you’ll be good to go.

A few notes about this release:

  • This is not an official Yorba release of Geary.  Please note the version number in the About box (Geary 0.4.2+backport).
  • Yorba will not be proactively fixing bugs or adding features to this backport.  If there’s sufficient interest in keeping the backport alive, we’re hoping the community will work together to maintain and update it.
  • If you encounter a bug with the backport, your best bet is to use the Geary mailing list to report it.  Please indicate in your email that you’re using the backport.  There’s no official bug tracking system for this backport at this time.

(One further note: due to some technical issues, the original Bountysource.com page was moved here.  Other than the URL, all details have remained the same.)

Congratulations Tom, and thanks!

GNOME and the missing one-fifth: part one

GNOME ParkingEarlier this year Lionel Driscot’s “The Last GUADEC” was slashdotted, redditted, and everthing else-itted that can happen to a viral blog post in the tech community.  It’s a provocative piece.  It also sparked for me the impetus to write this entry, which I’ve been mulling over for a few months.

My one nit with Driscot’s post are the questions he ends with, his call to action:

How can we evolve? Can we move the GNOME spirit into a web browser? How can we make use of our history and bring freedom to users instead of becoming just another web dev consultancy company?

These are not the questions I would have asked.  I do not believe the answers to these questions will yield appreciable fruit.

Here’s a portion of Emmanuele Bassi’s response to Driscot’s post (which I can no longer access, unfortunately):

GNOME is about building a whole operating system, and a whole ecosystem of apps, libraries, and tools, for people to create applications to consume and to create content.

This hovers closer to the questions I would have asked.

GNOME’s stated goal of “a complete free software solution for everyone” seems to me to be four-fifths met.  What GNOME offers is (1) free, (2) software, (3) a solution, and (4) for everyone.  I question the word complete.

I say this specifically as an application developer, not as someone maintaining a library or writing development tools.  Yorba isn’t even a cross-platform developer.  We target UNIX, and, frankly, we’re not proactive about any flavor of UNIX other than Linux.  Our requirements for a development platform aren’t particularly stiff.  Yet even slicing away Windows and Mac support, I still think GNOME is far from complete.

Here are the questions I would ask in place of Driscot’s:

  • How does the GNOME platform fit into a world of big and small interconnected devices accessing a variety of Internet services?
  • How is GNOME enticing developers to build upon — not build, build upon — that platform?

If I was a developer building Mac, iOS, Windows, or Android applications, I’d be able to answer those questions.  I honestly can’t answer those questions as GNOME application developer, at least not in full.

Thinking about those questions got me to thinking about another: What’s missing from the GNOME platform?  I’ll take that up in my next post.

Announcing Shotwell 0.15.1

shotwellYorba has released Shotwell 0.15.1, an important update to our Shotwell Photo Manager.  This update includes these fixes:

* Install Tumblr plugin resources (Tumblr plugin failed to work without them)
* Fix crash when video thumbnails are being inspected and created

Yorba strongly recommends all users upgrade to this release.

The tarball for Shotwell 0.15.1 is available at http://www.yorba.org/download/shotwell/0.15/shotwell-0.15.1.tar.xz  Ubuntu Quantal and Raring users can update by subscribing to Yorba’s PPA.  We hope that a version for Saucy will be available soon in Ubuntu’s repositories.

Geary 0.4.1 now available

Yorba is pleased to announce the release of Geary 0.4.1, the latest version of Yorba’s IMAP mail client.  We highly recommend all users upgrade to this version as it corrects a number of bugs.  Fixes and updates include:

  • Compile-time support for WebKitGTK 2.2
  • Fixes IMAP STARTTLS failure to connect bug
  • Works around LIST bug in IceWarp IMAP servers (crasher)
  • Solves crash when IMAP connect fails due to timeout
  • CamelCased MIME types now handled properly (prevents blank emails)
  • Adds missing RTL icons
  • New translations

Geary 0.4.1 can be downloaded from the Yorba web site.  See Yorba’s wiki for information on how to build and install.  Geary 0.4.1 is also available for Ubuntu users at Yorba’s PPA.

JIm Nelson's blog + archives from Yorba Foundation's original blog