[Evolution-hackers] Summer of Code Project

[David Morrison <dmorrison hmc edu>]

Hello, all~

My name is David Morrison, I was selected by GNOME and Google to
participate in Google's Summer of Code project working on Evolution.  I
will be a sophmore at Harvey Mudd College in the fall, and am pursuing a
joint major in computer science and math.

Anyways, I've been working pretty closely with Bryan Clark on this
project, and I've put together a spec for what I'm doing, which you can
read at http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmorrison/soc/Spec_revised.pdf -- the
basic rundown of my project is that I am going to be adding a
Gmail-style conversation view to Evolution, so that all messages in one
conversation can be seen in one continuous stream.  Bryan asked me to
email this list and ask for thoughts and suggestions on the proposal.
(Bryan also put together a couple mockups that work a little bit better
with evo's look-and-feel than mine do; you can see them here:
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmorrison/soc/conversation_email.png and
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmorrison/soc/conversation_email_reply.png)

Here are a few specific questions I have about the project as a whole:

- First of all, how feasible is what I'm talking about doing?  Will it
fit in easily with the direction the Evolution is going?  In other
words, will the work I'm doing be accepted by the Evo community, and if
not, is there some way I could change stuff to make it acceptable?

- Secondly, are there any foreseeable problems coding these changes?
What are going to be the trickiest parts?

- A couple questions more related to the overall design:  What do you
guys think of having an in-line reply box in the message view pane, like
Gmail does?  I said in the spec that I thought it probably wouldn't fit
as well, but Bryan seems to think it would be ok.

- I also said in the spec that using color to distinguish between
senders would not work as well, but I'm now thinking (and Bryan agrees)
that using a bit of color here and there would make things less a wash
of black-and-white.  Any thoughts on this one?

Any other comments or suggestions you guys have are also welcome.
Thanks in advance for your help!

David Morrison
dmorrison hmc edu