Tag: Anjal

anjal-settings capplet & smarter tabs

Email Settings Capplet

Thomas posted an awesome blog on GNOME/Moblin control center. Last week or so, I wrote a capplet to fit into the single-window control center. Screenshots below…

Screen1: Single window control center shell with Email setttings capplet in it.

Single window shell
Single window shell
Screen2: Anjal/Evolution account settingsScreen3: Anjal/Evolution account editor

Thanks to Matthew for the debonofication & all other refactoring, I was able to pull out the editor/settings from Evolution as a stand alone capplet. Its part of anjal source and it uses some bits from anjal which helps to get everything up and running outside the Evolution shell. Without starting Evolution users will be able to open up the account settings, and first time open will get them a druid to setup basic account and other configurations like evolution. Since the evolution accounts stored in gconf, changes to the settings via this is instantaneous even if evolution or anjal is running in the background. Beyond all of these, it reuses 99% of evolution sources and with a little shell from anjal, it just works!

Smarter Tabs

In anjal, an user can open mails in new tab or composer in a new tab from draft. Generic tab implementation, appended tabs at the end and when closed the last but 1 from the closed tab is selected. The work flow for the user would be very difficult. To fix the problem, anjal considers the following while deciding which tab to chose or where to place.

– When a tab is opened, it is placed next to a relavant tab. A email tab is placed next to the folder. Composer draft tab is placed next to draft folder tab. Rest of the tabs are appended to the end.

– When a tab is opened, its remembered from where its opened. The lastly viewed folder, or any other tab will be the one which will be opened if this is closed.

– On multiple visits, the last visit is only remembered.

Should I consider any other case? IIRC Chrome has a similar scheme.

Announcing ‘Anjal’- the new mail for netbooks

What is Anjal?

Anjal is a new mail UI created on top of Evolution. It would have a very interesting UI & features, that would make it the very suitable for low memory/processor/resolution devices.  It is Evolution & EDS at the back of Anjal. We have broken down Evolution mail library to a smaller component and made a reusable shared library to be used by Evolution.

Anjal would be using WebKit for mail rendering and composing. It features a nice multi-line message list, with unquoted text-preview of the latest  messages in the thread.  Its configurable to make it even more lighter, by choosing a sqlite-cursor-based tree view, which would have the visible window of the message list on memory, very suitable for mobile environments. It supports tabbed browsing, a small preference window & new account setup. The project is ~20 days old and would go more changes as it grows, wrt features and UI, to make it a good mail-client for GNOME on Netbooks.

Message list
Message list

It would feature a nice conversation view, where you can open/view threads on the conversation view. Yeah, you would ideally see your messages also part of the thread.

I have some more screenshots at here.

The code is hosted in git://git.gnome.org/anjal You can check out, try use it  and ofcourse contribute to it. You probably have to patch EDS, Evolution and Webkit which adds some new apis. The patches are part of the source repository. We don’t have a bugzilla yet, but we are working hard for  a 0.1 pretty soon. Pour your feedback to me.

Update:

Andre asked me to explain the name for ‘Anjal’ 🙂 . Anjal means ‘Mail’ in Tamil