Re: [Ayatana] Evolution

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Jeremy Nickurak <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I for one have sort of checked out of the evolution design conversation,
> because Evolution's poor IMAP performance makes it largely unusable with
> large IMAP folders, especially Gmail ones with thousands upon thousands of
> emails.

I'm really jealous of a lot of cell phone operating systems, to that
end. (Why do they get all the cool, simple stuff? It's no fair!).
The email clients in Android, iPhone OS and WebOS each have
functionality so they load the 20 most recent messages in your gmail
inbox, then there's a “Load more messages” option at the bottom of the
list which pulls in the next 20, and so on. Really slick, and
completely sensible.
Whether that design is suited to a desktop email client may be an
interesting discussion.

> Thunderbird's integration with the messaging menu and indicators and
> notify-osd seems to be moving fast, and its performance is substantially
> better. Maybe Thunderbird is the way forward? I love that evolution feels
> more like a regular gnome application, but if it doesn't work, that doesn't
> help much.

One big thing Evolution has over Thunderbird is that little calendar
in the Gnome Clock applet, which talks to the Evolution Data Server to
display your appointments. No such beauty if you use Thunderbird's
calendar extension.

I would hate to lose the feature for even a minute. I would have to
stop mentioning it in ubiquity-slideshow, I would be very sad, and I
would probably be late to school every day :(

Is there a specification coming up that examines how this will work
with indicator-datetime? I think a straight agenda (not a calendar)
would be more logical, and it seems like a great opportunity to
rebuild that component in a more extensible, higher performance way so
that Evolution / Thunderbird / Google Calendar (though that could just
be via Evolution) / GTG support could just be plugged in naturally.
(And so it doesn't take two seconds to open the menu on my netbook).
This component could be a nice stepping stone to making Thunderbird
fit naturally for people.

Thanks,
Dylan