Anjal – Moblin updates

Moblin 2.0 is announced, and I can be more open 🙂 now. Before I start with anything, one thing that I missed last time. The ‘new-ness’, ‘awesome-ness’ of Anjal’s UI, *FULL* credits of the UI design goes to the Intel UI Team, specially thanks Nick Richards, Hylke Bons, and Clarie Alexander. I really donno how many hours, its  Nick who discussed each and every page of it in detail in chat, and helped me create the UI from mock. Btw, don’t ask and compare his wireframe with the UI 😉 , it deviates a bit, due to feasibility, etc.

Now back to Anjal… screenshots…. descriptions. Here goes the main screen.

The main focus points on the main screen:-

  • Tabs – Every single thing is a tab.
    • Your mail, folder, settings, account details, etc.
    • Every thing is a unique tab. Meaning double click opened mail, you would be directed to the already opened tab.
    • Are you a keyboard power user? If so, you can live inside singe tab. Keyboard controls (ENTER) opens the message in the same tab of the folder and BACKSPACE takes you back to the folder view. You don’t have to worry with mouse.
  • Threads – I would call it smart threads, similar to gmailish.
    • Threads group them selves, and moves up the sort, as and when you get new mails to it.
    • The count says, how many messages you have in it. May be later, I would add how many new in it as well.
    • The live-preview, gets you approx ~200 chars from the latest message of the thread. Its picks unquoted text, leaves out headers etc and gets you the possible best of the message.
    • On the left, mark entire thread as read and on the right, mark all as junk/spam.
  • People – Its not yet implemented. Ideally it would add a tab of addressbook.

  • Thread Display – Everything inside a thread.
    • This is the message view, with in the same tab. Other would look no different, when in a new tab.
    • It just lists down the messages with in the thread.
    • Auto scrolls down, to the first unread message, and auto expands it.
    • Marks messages as read, as you scroll down the messages in the thread.
    • ‘show details’ – hides most of the headers. Click that or Shift Left/right shows that.

Oh, you need to reply?

Click that ‘Reply to Andre Klapper’ button, opens you a inline composer, scrolled down well. Write up can and press Send. and continue reading rest of the thread. Next composing a new mail ?

‘To:’ – Auto completes from EDS. We just don’t have an addressbook UI.

Need to search for an email ?

Type and Enter to search. Instant apply message list. No regen etc. Thread in message list adpot to search automagically. Preview in message list too adpots to search. Fixed sorting options now,  instant apply when selected.

First time creating?

You will get a 1024×568 min welcome screen. It is intelligent than it appears.

  • Auto fills Full Name from user account
  • You just fill-in email-address. If its a popular service, it does the rest.
    • ‘rupert@gmail.com’ then it fills in the IMAP/SMTP configuration automatically.
    • Now just have GMAIL, Yahoo, MSN, AOL. In future, we would support more. I would like to do even region wise support.

Check up everything on the review page.

The setting page, now only provides an option to edit account. More preferences should be done down the lane. Its pretty usable now, though there are some random crashers and issue.

Anjal has a bugzilla in GNOME and should be easy to try out and report a bug.

Source code is maintained at http://git.gnome.org/cgit/anjal and Anjal need patched  Evolution/EDS and Webkit. Patches available as part of the source code itself for various versions.

GNOME 2.27.x would have the Evo/EDS patches merged in a week or so and I *must* soon push the webkit patches, been busy and didn’t have much time.

Want to try out? Bharath is actively maintianing OpenSUSE build service daily snapshots – http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME://Evolution://snapshots/ Try out Anjal on OpenSUSE 11.1 / Factory.

If you catch Bharath(abharath) on irc (GimpNet-#evolution/FreeNode-#opensuse-gnome), make him to build for GNOME 2.26. Easy buy him time or Chicken. Anything would do 🙂

Or easier, find out how to try Moblin2 on OpenSUSE and see  http://en.opensuse.org/Moblin for screenshots etc . We have a *scary* (It will wipe off your disk and Install OpenSUSE/Moblin) iso as well as installable rpms.

Even easier, install from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Moblin://UI/openSUSE_11.1 or http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Moblin://UI/openSUSE_Factory build service repositories. [I hope the build would complete before you try. If not, be patient for a few hours]

Ok, all those apart, its still not yet 0.1, which is gonna be very soon. It works well, reliable, but there some crashes, minor issue, ui glitches yet to be carved to perfection 🙂 which is on the way very soon.

On the whole, checkout everything, join us. Moblin rocks!!!