ubuntu-tablet team mailing list archive

[Matt Richardson <m.richardson.1990@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I enquired with the developer of Trojitá (an IMAP email client written 
in Qt) regarding adding a touch-friendly interface and Pop3 support 
following discussion about Ubuntu tablet having its own touch-friendly 
email client. The response is below. If anyone is interested in helping 
with this (I might be interested in helping with the UI side of things) 
please contact me.

Matt

On 02/16/12 01:55, Matt Richardson wrote:

> I'm not sure how to start this so I'll just launch into it.
> On the Ubuntu-tablet mailing list there is some discussion centred
> around choosing a touch-friendly email client for Ubuntu on a tablet.
> Since Ubuntu now ships Qt by default and since Unity 2D (which would be
> the logical choice of interface on a tablet) is written in Qt, it would
> make sense to use an email client written in Qt.
Hi Matt, thanks for your interest. Answers are below.


> I was wondering if you would be interested in spending a little time
> (hopefully with help if I can get interest) in creating a touch-friendly
> interface for Trojitá.
A touch-optimized interface is on the TODO list and I*will*  do that at
some point. However, the problem is that the TODO list is pretty long
already and other tasks (like optimizing the IMAP support and improving
other areas) have higher priority.

The task itself won't be hard, though -- Trojita is very modular inside,
and most of the new code would be very simple and GUI-focused, with no
knowledge of IMAP or Trojita's internals required. Essentially, all that
the touch interface would have to do is setting up some QML-based views
with fancy item delegates on top of the already existing Trojita models.

If someone would like to do a mockup of the touch-oriented UI in QML,
I'd be happy to accept such a contribution. Some very preliminary work
on that is available in src/Harmattan/trojita/qml/trojita/, but it's
mainly just an experiment for playing around on my Nokia N950. As I
said, doing that would not require any deep knowledge of Trojita's
internals; a design passion and basic QML familiarity should be enough IMHO.


> Another desirable feature (which I could not see mentioned on your
> website) would be Pop3 support. I notice you advertise Trojitá as an
> IMAP client so if you would not be interested in adding Pop3 support I
> understand.
POP3 support is not important for my personally, so I do not plan to
write that myself.  If someone would like to have POP3 support, I'm of
course available for consulting with pretty reasonable rates (I've
already added features to Trojita that were not important for me, but
were requested by customers).  And if anyone else would like to
contribute the POP3 code themselves*and*  maintain it, I'd be happy to
accept such a patch as well.

Please feel free to share this answer to any interested parties.

With kind regards,
Jan

-- Trojita, a fast e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/