Aethera 1.0

gatch writes "theKompany.com released version 1.0 of their cross-platform PIM suite Aethera. KOrganizer is included as a calendar and todo list component. Check out these screenshots. According to Shawn Gordon, theKompany president, 'Actually we are about 2 weeks away from having Aethera work with Kolab [groupware server] - at least that is our sense of it at the moment.' Interesting discussion at KDE.news."

Re:PIM? Groupware? Exchange servers?

[panurge]

Well, in theory they allow efficient cooperation between users within the corporate environment by providing access to shared data and resources, by providing group access to diaries, and by providing an effective means to sort and categorise information.
BEGIN cynicism:
In practice, often the only feature that really gets used is email (which could just as easily be handled with plain old SMTP) but at least Exchange keeps MCSEs employed.END cynicism

I guess groupware has a bell function: the people who most need it are too disorganised to use it, the people best qualified to use it are in the jobs where they don't need it, or make their own arrangements.

Re:Looks too much like XP

[kfg]

You are neglecting the fact that AT&T UNIX was at one time open source. That's how Berkeley got ahold of the code in the first place.It was even free as in beer.

BSD UNIX is not a clone of AT&T UNIX. Through the efforts of Bill Joy and others BSD evolved directly from it.In an open manner. And they gave it away.

That's why AT&T sued BSDI for selling it. . . and lost, because the code was already open source.

KFG

Torrent for the screenshots

[McDutchie]

The server is slow and may be totally slashdotted soon, so here is a torrent [demon.nl] I made which contains all the 11 screenshots in .png format. Please use this instead of the main webserver. (Read about BitTorrent [bitconjurer.org] if you're not familiar with it.)

Re:I don't mean to be a troll..

[Phil John]

Worked fine for me, I'm running a nightly though!

Is it that they are transparent with no background texture and therefore hard to read? The problem is you didn't wait for the menu background image to load, it took >1 minute for me, probably because they're being slashdotted.

PIM on Linux

[LauraW]

I'm not sure what the official definition of PIM and groupware are, but here's what they mean to me: PIM is a Personal Information Manager (e.g. a PalmPilot), and groupware is software that helps people collaborate at work. There are a lot of overblown "solutions" to these problems that end up causing more work than they eliminate. Lotus Notes is a good (bad) example. When I was at IBM they had all sorts of "workflow" applications written in Notes. To do annual reviews of people in my group I had to get them to fill out a bunch of forms in a horrendous Notes UI, and then their colleagues would fill out some forms, and then I'd have to go in and fill out my own forms, and then the employee could fill out a response form. All of this in the awful Notes UI, and all on a glacially slow server because everyone in the company had to do it at the same time. Paper would have been easier.

On the other hand, PIMs can be really useful. I'm back to being a plain old engineer, but I still like to keep my address book and calendar in my Palm Vx and sync it up with the corresponding software on the desktop. That way if I'm at a meeting I can look at the Palm to see what's next on the schedule, and if I'm somewhere else (e.g. a doctor's appointment) I can check to see what days are free for my 6-month checkup visit. :-) Some people also sync their email onto Palms or Blackberries or whatever, but I've never seen the point. I'm happy to get away from it for a while.

Getting all of this to work on Windows is pretty easy. You can install Palm Desktop and sync the thing to that, or you can just install HotSync and then use "conduits" that sync up the Mozilla address book, Notes, and lots of other tools.

On Linux, you can use KPilot and KOrganizer. I got them set up on the Linux box at my new job a few days ago, and they seem to work ok. The (big) catch is that I don't really want to store my info in KOrganizer. I want the addresses to go into Mozilla and the calendar entries to go into the weird "Corporate Time" system our group uses at work. Unfortunately there's no CorporateTime conduit for Linux (only Linux and Mac), and I haven't been able to make the Mozilla one work on Linux yet either.

Summary: Linux is getting pretty good in the PIM/groupware department, but it has a little ways to go to catch up to Windows.

Re:Looks too much like XP

[miguel]

AT&T Unix was never open source.

It was distributed to universities under a research license.

The lawsuit issue is more complex, because it was never discussed in court, instead USL and Berkeley settled the case.

Berkeley agreed to remove all the files that still contained ATT code. That used to be called "4.4 BSD Lite" which could not boot, as opposed to "4.4BSD Encumbered" which was a complete implementation.

The free BSD distros of today derive from BSD Lite 4.4

Re:Adds to the confusion

[Rhone]

Well, to be fair to Aethera, it has been in development for a long time--it didn't just pop up out of nowhere. If I recall correctly, it began as a KDE-based Outlook-clone called Magellan. I think development of Magellan started back around the time development of Evolution started, if not earlier. Aethera was theKompany's fork of Magellan (I don't know for sure, but I think they forked it because they had an interest in Magellan and were sick of it being developed at a snail's pace). Of course, work on Aethera didn't seem to happen much faster... do a search for "Aethera" on Slashdot and you'll see "Aethera Beta 1 Released" back in January... 2001. Maybe changing from KDE to just QT slowed them down a bit.

It's GPL

[Rhone]

Yeah, I found it kind of strange that theKompany's web site doesn't make Aethera's license entirely clear. On the other hand, when you click on a download link and get sent to Sourceforge without having to buy it, it becomes pretty obvious that it's at least free-as-in-beer.

And if you download and untar the source code (as I did, because I was curious about this as well), you'll see from the COPYING and COPYING.GPL files that it's apparently licensed under the GPL.

Yay.

lack of filters

[GnomeSkull]

One thing I like about evolution is that when you are setting up your filters you can filter on pretty much anything you want, including specific headers. This helps for using things like popfile or spambayes filters which use their own specific headers. Aethera only lets you filter on the plain old stuff (subject, body, to, from, etc - no specific headers). Modifying subject lines is so ugly. But other than that, I like how it operates. And importing from other mailboxes, calendar files, etc. seems to work quite well!