Re: tips on email from ibm?

[Bryan W Clark <clarkbw clarkson edu>]

On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 14:54, Alan wrote:
> Assuming these ideas aren't patented up the kazoo, what are the chances
> of some of the gnome apps such as evolution or sylpheed adding in some
> of the features that are noted.  Some are pretty simple ideas (ie:
> pop up a one line summary of all messages in a thread on mouseover) but
> I can see how they could really make a difference.  They have done a lot
> of reasearch on this it seems as well.

Just to give a little more insight, 

Many of the ideas shown are patented, I don't recall exactly which ones
are patented or just in the process.  

The message summary mouse over isn't patented, so we could go for that.
:)

As far as I recall, the Thread Arc Visualization system is patented. 
The other visualizations might be under patent process, not sure.

I don't believe the thread highlighting was under patent and is an easy
system to build assuming you have a good thread parsing engine. (their
parsing engine is probably the patented part, but anyone can write their
own thread recognizer and i believe evo has one).

The Collections system is the same as the VFolders that evo already has,
however ReMail has a better widget for organizing your collections.  The
screen-shot you see is actually a free-form layout which gives vertical
sliding control to the collections listed (i.e you can slide the
collections up and down and over each other to give more spacing between
certain ones and group others together).  

Much of the work on the Sources system was done by another intern, I'm
not aware of patents regarding it.  It is a pretty sweet system of
centralizing your subscription/email/news information into this same
ReMail threading interface.  You can turn information sources on and off
so you can prioritize your work by turning off lists and newsgroups you
don't want to see at the moment.

The Calendar has the classic Notes "create calendar entry from email"
which is nice.  The same date search over email messages can be done on
a text index search of emails. 

I don't see the TODO system they had, so I'm not sure if I can talk
about it since they don't show.  But I'll throw it in your face to say
that it was a really sweet (free form again) way of organizing your TODO
list, building items from emails or calendar entries :-)

The Chat/Presence integration is not patented and actually one of the
bounties[1].

Wearing my "I interned there this past summer" hat,
~ Bryan

[1] http://gnome.org/bounties/IM.php3#127546

-- 
Bryan W Clark
Graduate Student
Math && Computer Science Dept.
Human Computer Interaction Group
Clarkson University
Potsdam, NY USA
 
http://www.clarkson.edu/~clarkbw/