Re: The future of gnome-pim - and Balsa, too?

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

>With Evolution 1.0 soon to be realeased, I'm a bit concerned about the
>future of other GNOME applications that implement some of its
>functionality, mainly the Calender and Address Book, but to a certain
>extent Balsa, too.

First,  I am a very happy Evolution user.  Evolution FINALLY plugs a
HUGE hole in the Linux application suite,  the calendering etc...
actually can interact with other e-mail platforms (cough, Outlook,
cough).

But the evolution address book, calendering, etc... components are
Bonobo components.  Someone could implement "stand alone" calendar,
address book applications.  I think finally at least a quasi-standard
central address book and calender available to multiple applications is
a big step forward.  I used to use Balsa simply because it used the
Gnome Address book.

Also evolution uses the CAMEL libraries for mail message management
etc....  Anyone could build another mail UI on top of CAMEL.  Again the
ability for some app, other than my mail client, being able to at least
see that my mail folders exist is another big step forward.

>What I'm driving at, is that I'd rather use Balsa+gnome-pim+perhaps some
>other tools, than Evolution, because I believe that a wristwatch shouldn't
>be able to make toasts, if you know what I'm saying.
>What are other people's comments/opinion on this?

I agree that modularity and plurality is good.  And I think the coming
rise of Evolution as a pre-eminant application does not inhibit this,
although other smaller applets may need to change their methods around a
little.