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

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On 14 Aug 2001 10:23:45 +0200, Toralf Lund wrote:
> > The answer is simple: 
> > 
> > addressbook: I think we can all see why this is needed, yes?
> Of course. I still think it should be a separate application that may be
> started independently of the e-mail client, though. I want to access my
> address book without sending e-mail often enough.

You realise that evolution-addressbook *is* a separate application,
right? True, no one has written a shell for it so that you can *just*
open the addressbook, but that can be done fairly simply by anyone.

> > 
> > calendar: this isn't generally needed by a single-user at home, but for
> > an office this feature is very useful. It allows people to schedule
> > meetings with each other and remind them of important dates/times/etc
> > via email - the most common form of communication over a network.
> No, I don't buy this argument. In think you want an e-mail client _and_ a
> calendar application, along with a good exchange mechanism for data
> (perhaps
> simply a suitable format), rather than an e-mail-and-calendar application
> with internal data exchange.
> 
> On _our_ network, the most common type of e-mail data is:
> 	1. Raster images and vectorised versions of these in some form.
> 	2. Bits of code, patches, design suggestions etc.
> Does this mean that we should have an e-mail client that is also an image
> editor, vectorising tool, compiler, CASE application etc.?
> 
> The point is simply that providing the necessary "glue" to allow the
> different tools to work smoothly together is the desktop's job, not the
> application's. - What's that you are saying? You found that the desktop
> didn't do this job quite well enough? Well, you do have its source code,
> don't you?

What's the difference between passing data back and forth between the
mailer/calendar using "internal data exchange" and the way you want it?
Do you even *know* how evolution passes this data along? It uses CORBA -
if that's "internal", I have no idea what "external" would be.

The "glue" in this case is Bonobo, which as far as I'm aware is not part
of the application at all, it *is* a part of the desktop as much as it
can be.

I think that you're a bit confused as to how Evolution actually works...

> 
> On a slightly different note, one of the reasons for exchanging "calendar"
> information via e-mail may be the lack of a good network-shared calendar
> environment. If you had developed a complete solution here (which is, of
> course, a considerable task), you may just have found that the need for
> e-mail exchange (of this kind of data) had gone away.

The reason there isn't a shared calendar currently is because the
specification has not yet been finished as far as I'm aware (so yes, you
are correct there). We're also trying to interoperate which I think 99%
of the people would prefer. Interoperability is a heck of a lot more
important than having a server, don't you agree?

I doubt that once a shared server is implemented and floating around
that the need for sending shared calendar data back and forth will come
to an end. There will always be people that don't have access to a
shared calendar server.

> 
> >
> > And there we have it...
> > 
> > > I know the answer to the question about why exactly
> > > these tasks were integrated, of course, it is simply "because Microsoft
> > did
> > > it", but I don't think that's a good answer. This touches on another
> > > concern I have about GNOME: I think that too much time is spent on
> > > emulating MS Windows behaviour. Why? Aren't we all using Linux/Unix
> > because
> > > Windows is crap???
> > 
> > Would you prefer we emulate what? CDE? Yea, I can just picture Joe
> > Computer User using CDE as their desktop. Riiiight.
> Like someone else said: I don't think we should emulate any particular
> desktop, we
> should combine the best features of different environments, and try to add
> some real invention to it.
> 
> Having said that, I always liked the IMD, a.k.a. 4D desktop, on the SGI.
> And I have seen Joe Computer User use that, he happens to be one of our
> customers...
> > 
> > GNOME is about bringing easy-to-use software to the masses ,it's not
> > about emulating Windows (except where the Windows UI is good) or making
> > a Hacker-Desktop.
> Well, I'm glad you are saying that, because that's the way I think it ought
> to be.
> 
> What I was saying, really, was that Outlook is one of the areas where the
> Windows UI is _not_ very good, but that's just my opinion, of course. (But
> I don't think I'm without support, my sceptisism is mainly based on the
> fact that the design breaks with some fundamental principles set out in
> fields like Structured Design and, since someone else mentioned this, HCI.)

I think that if you actually ask around, you'll find that you are one of
the handful of people that don't think Outlook is a great application
(security issues aside, of course).

Perhaps you'd like to give me examples of where it breaks fundamental
principals set out in fields of Structured Design?

I will say that introducing a computer illiterate person to Outlook
would probably not work out too well, so yea - it's not as user-friendly
as one would desire it to be. But on the same token, "user-friendly" is
a relative measurement. I don't think a single program can truly say
it's "perfect" with reguards to HCI.

Jeff