Thoughtful Spot

What time is it anyway ?

2007-03-20T11:27:00.000+05:30

With the Daylight Savings Time redefined in some of the countries this year, it was a good time to visit old bugs and discover others which had been lurking in the dark. Chen has been doing a fabulous job fixing the timezone data used by evolution-data-server and recently, he posted a migration tool to sanitize current and future appointments in the Evolution calendar that had been created in the past.

The timezone data generated by vzic does not always seem to agree with the Exchange Servers or with timeanddate.com as Chen had pointed out in an earlier post. If you happen to notice something you believe is still incorrect in Evolution 2.10.0, please let us know here.

Then again, we are just buying time before there is one blessed authorized timezone database on the Desktop which all applications consume and I wonder when would that be.

Recomposing the Evolution composer

2007-02-28T09:22:00.000+05:30

Ben makes a good, valid point. Reminds me of the 'Mark as Junk' and 'Mark as Not Junk' icons holding hands together on the Mailer toolbar.

Under the hood, it appears to be a limitation with BonoboUI (or perhaps just how it is being used ?) that if you hide buttons based on context [like message (not) marked junk, HTML/Plain text etc.] , you mess up their placements in the toolbar and they are free to jump left and right to their current positions in different contexts.
Think Dynamic Menu generation. One other reason to take that decisive step towards gtktoolbar.

Evolution IMAP - learning to live offline

2006-10-02T12:17:00.000+05:30

Murray , thanks for all those constructive comments. Much of the problems that you have mentioned stem directly from the still-young-and-improving offline support in Evolution. Primarily,

the user interface with multiple configuration points that do not clearly tell you what happens (or does not). We are working towards a simpler, intuitive and a 'usable' interface in the current Two Ten dev series.
As you have so rightly mentioned, the download for offline use interferes with the foreground operations. This is a PITA and hopefully we would be letting Evo 2.10 handle this in a more sensible way

Until then, the 'Cancel' Button on the toolbar is your friend - it is not a panacea, especially for GW/Exchange accounts - but on IMAP - it works like a charm and gives you the control when you want it back - all the times.

[gnome] [evolution]

Evolution Very Much Alive and Kicking

2006-09-26T23:42:00.000+05:30

Jason, an interesting post though I think you got many facts wrong (including my nationality). Grepping mail headers for X-Mailer *Evolution* is indeed a good trick for a quick pulse-check. I would have imagined you would have chosen a similar dipstick on the cvs, the release site or bugzilla to find out if the project was still alive. It is true that triaging Evolution takes a very long time - it tops the 'open bugs' and 'opened last week' stats but - oh yes, it tops the 'closed last week' column week after week too, thanks to a lot of GNOMErs who still love, use and contribute to the project.

It *is* a shame that the crasher you had reported got triaged after 5 months and you were asked for a stack trace 'when we could have got one, if we indeed cared'. Please do file the 'some eight to ten crashes' mentioned in your blog and see if we fare any better now.
And if you need a nudge to try Evolution again, check out some stats and the charts on Evolution 2.8 IMAP performance.
[gnome] [evolution]

The monkey is out

2006-08-08T22:10:00.000+05:30

You can now download Evolution 2.7.91, Evolution-Data-Server 1.7.91 and GtkHTML-3.11.91. Here is an overview of what is new in this development series.

Global search in Mailer and Quick Search defaults
Wide Screen mode, Vertical Preview
Cairo integration for better look and feel
Faster Performance and reduced Memory footprints in Mail (IMAP and GW)
Improved Load sequence for GW Calendar - now loads 10 times faster
Reduced EDS memory footprint - separate cache for Tasks/Calendar/Memos,
reduced static linkages and loads of leak fixes in Contacts and Calendar
Support for GW Reminder Notes and Mail retract
Sharable Notes in the Journal (filesystem).
Allow dynamic linking to libdb
gnome-keyring support

Stay tuned for the cool charts and hard numbers.
In the meanwhile, you can help us make this release even better by filing bug reports and contributing patches.

Ten On Ten

2006-07-10T09:43:00.000+05:30

Wow! The SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 scores a Ten On Ten.

GUADEC archives

2006-07-08T16:04:00.000+05:30

Bad, I had to miss the action at GUADEC this year. Got to view the 'How much faster' and 'Taming the Beast' slides. Still waiting for the Archives to be up. Anyone , please ?

Just Moved In !

2006-06-07T10:05:00.000+05:30

I have moved to Blogger.com as my blog on gnome.org was blown away by a spam attack a couple of months ago. Picked up the auto-response ticket ID and waited long but then there is one post that I really want to respond to - so here I am.

Thom : Evolution did an overhaul of its menus and shortcuts to be more HIG-friendly in Evolution 2.6 and we are constantly incorporating most of the feedback we receive through bugzilla and Better Desktop.
Evolution HEAD already supports a vertical preview pane - and the current development release is working towards configurable toolbars and even better searching.

We are listening here and in the Bugzilla.
[gnome] [evolution]