Re: [Evolution-hackers] Evolution Ideas for Future

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

I think we looked at this when it was published anyway.  A bunch of the
ideas were just out of scope at the time.

> I just read this article and would like to comment on the individual
> ideas. Some of them are pretty good. Others are OK, but have some
> simple flaws. I'll take their ideas in order, as they come. :)
> 
> 1) Floating PIM Pane
> 
> 	This is something we definately need. It shouldn't really be
> 	"in" the application, per se, so much as a separate tiny desktop
> 	app, itself. Something more akin to Konfabulator/Karamba would
> 	be great. It would be a quick easy way to see what appointments
> 	and tasks you have for the day, as well as perhaps a quick
> 	summary of the amount of mail you have in selected folders. Or
> 	perhaps this could also be integrated as a module for GKrellm.

Looks quite like a souped-up summary in a separate window.

> 2) Split-view Message List
> 
> 	Not sure why they say "in-box" here. Inbox is the correct 	english, and
> is a special folder, so unless you are dealing with
> 	multiple IMAP accounts that aren't just converged into the same
> 	"Inbox", such as Mail.app on OSX does things. This would
> 	probably be a good thing for Evoluton to do as well, and would
> 	simplify the UI a whole lot. Adding multiple trees for e-mail
> 	folders at the top of the UI would not be hard to do, but could
> 	be rather ueseless without the new-style Outlook list widget.

I'm not so keen on this one.  Mainly because its already a bit of a task
fitting enough useful information in the list for it to be usable.  And
then you also have the user-interface ambiguity of which pane is
currently active etc.  e.g. see the way unfocussed message-lists still
display the selected message which matches the one displayed below.

> 3) Built-in Instant Messaging
> 
> 	This really doesn't belong in a groupware client. The proper
> 	thing to do, would be to provide the necessary integration with
> 	an external IM client. Or, more preferrably, have a standard way

Yeah, evo plugins? ...  They also come up with some odd stuff like an
online buggon 'only if they use your client'.  Which seems pretty bunk -
what do they mean, you have the IM implemented directly as part of the
app, ignoring all other IM protocols and directories?

And yeah, what about video/phone conferencing?

> 4) Calendar-linked Auto-reply
> 
> 	This sounds really neat. I would love to see something like this
> 	go into Evolution. It probably wouldn't be very hard to do,
> 	either, especially with the calendar abstraction and nice
> 	filters.

Well ...
 - often you don't care if they're there or not, otherwise you'd phone
them up/im them, and getting a mail to say they wont reply for a few
hours might just be more noise than signal.
 - it could divulge otherwise personal information you didn't want to
(i.e. am i at home/in my office)
 - if you do the IM thing, then it just duplicates the same
functionality it could provide (and you may indeed be mailing them
because they're away from their IM client ...).

> 6) Spam Auto-reporting
> 
> 	Evolution can be integrated very easily with spamassassin which
> 	can do pretty much everything listed here. The only place where
> 	an issue of integration stands, is with providing a nice UI to
> 	do the Bayesian classification, and manual spam reporting, as
> 	well as white/black-listing addresses and things. Though I would
> 	love to see us get some UI in for this, with a backend
> 	abstraction, to allow those people who want to use bogofilter or
> 	something else, for their filtering. It would not be that hard
> 	to do, either.

If we did some plugin system it would be easy to do, if only we had one.

> 7) Mouseover Contact Information
> 
> 	Adding the ability to pop up a tooltip with basic information
> 	from a VCard, when the mouse is over an address in the "Sender"
> 	column is pretty simple. Extending on what was said in the
> 	article, we could pull a VCard attachment from the mail, if the
> 	person is not in your addressbook, and the mail has a vcard
> 	attachment.

What happens when you mouse-over a multiple address field and one which
doesn't fit on screen?

> 8) Smart E-Mail Notification
> 
> 	This is something that I hope I can do some things for, for the
> 	2.0 release of Evolution. The ideas in this article, are
> 	something that would be easy to do. The "Important" thing,
> 	depends on the mailer getting support for priority flag headers,
> 	though. Hopefully, I can get an external app to handle this,
> 	written pretty soon.

Naah you could just use the existing label system.  And use filters to
do the marking.  Whats the external app needed for?

> 9) All-powerful Right-clicking
> 
> 	Evolution already does pretty much all of this. Evolution also
> 	has VFolders, which doesn't actually move the mail, so the
> 	menus are more bulky than typical. Even without the VFolders,
> 	the context menus are still pretty large. I think it a better
> 	idea to work on simplifying the UI as much as possible. The
> 	context menus can still be powerful, even without as much stuff
> 	in them.

This is always a two edged sword, if you put too much into the context
menu, it becomes less usable.

> Bonus) P2P Document Sharing
> 
> 	This is probably done better with some combination/integration
> 	method with Rendezvous, MultiSync, and possible one of the open
> 	p2p protocols.

Versioning and so forth would be neat.  But this sounds like a much
bigger problem than should be pushed into a mailer (i presume it uses
email as the transport protocol).