Re: Evolution Plugins (Was Re: Rise of the Plugins)

[Sankar P <psankar novell com>]

On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 07:22 +0000, Philip Withnall wrote:
> We currently have the other extreme: several different applications
> each
> have their own take on the address book (and then each have their own
> different ways of integrating/syncing it with e-d-s). Why not just
> have
> one desktop-wide address book (I'm thinking Soylent here), and have
> the
> mail application use that instead? This would give us the opportunity
> to
> swap out the address book application in favour of other things if
> necessary, such as an application which would use some web service as
> an
> address book.


I am not much aware of what Soylent is. So I cannot comment about using
that atm. However, evolution-data-server is the system-wide address-book
that will answer your needs. IIRC, eds exposes a dbus interface which
can be consumed by any of the desktop applications, say Contacts,
Gnome-calendar, OpenOffice, etc. Evolution-Addressbook (not eds) is just
another client for the evolution-data-server addressbook. Probably Ross
Burton can explain in more detail. 


> > IMHO a better approach will be to make the user choose what
> components
> > he want to see in his Switcher. Say if someone wants to use only
> Mailer
> > and Address-book, do not bother showing the Calendar component in
> the
> > switcher.
> 
> But that's effectively like turning the components into plugins, and
> then disabling some of them; it comes back to the problem that core
> functionality shouldn't be in plugins, and you might as well split off
> such plugins into separate applications.
> 
> > Atleast for me, It will be far more useful than launching two or
> three
> > applications everyday morning (Mail/Calendar/Tasks)
> 
> Isn't that what your startup programs list is for? :-P


Yeah. I should have made it a little elaborate. Everytime I (or any
corporate user) launches evolution, what I want to do with that is:

-> Send/receive mails

-> Accept/Decline/Schedule appointments

-> Mark the tasks that I have completed, so my boss knows if it is worth
paying me for.


In addition to these basic activities sometimes I may be publishing my
calendar etc. 

All these activities adhere to the Communication aspect of an office
worker. And I do this atleast 4-5 times a day. Rest of the times I spend
on gnome-planner, OO, vi etc. So opening three applications for this
communication aspect, each time, may not be an appealing option.

I do not say that it is bad/evil to split applications but IMHO it may
be a better idea to have Gnome applications aligned/coupled on the lines
user behaviors, bringing similar applications in a shell, but
very-loosely tied. In the same way how OO has a Spreadsheet, Doc-writer,
Presentation-tool. Just my 0.001 Paisa(1). though :)

> 
> Regards,
> Philip
-- 
Sankar P
(1) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisa