Evolution 2.0 Released, Screenshots

comforteagle writes "This seems to be slow getting out, but since Novell hasn't updated their site ... Evolution 2.0.0 has been released. Most importantly it has built in JunkFilter support with SpamAssassin, web calendars, and NNTP support. Oh, and some bugfixes. I've posted some screenshots today as well."

Win32?

[CdBee]

I see links to the usual *nix builds. There was some talk a while ago, sparked by Eugenia's interview on osnews.com with Miguel de Icaza, that Evolution 2.0 would be fully cross-platform.

Oh well. Guess I stay with Thunderbird.

For Some reason...

[ajiva]

For some reason Evolution has ALWAYS been faster on my machine than Thunderbird or Mozilla mail. Plus looking at the screenshots it looks like they've simplified Evolution even more, so I'm hoping it'll be that much nicer. Of course it still looks like an Outlook clone...

Linux apps on Windows

[augustz]

It would be great for folks to realize that writing apps cross-platform is one of the single best ways to get TONS of adoption, and ease any eventual transitions to Linux.

I'll bet that despite being more featurefull, Evolution will be trounced be Thunderbird in terms of usage in the foreseable future.

But cool to see a very swanky looking release.

I use it, like it

[fire-eyes]

I use it, have been for over a week now. Or something.

I find it is significantly faster all around, the interface is cleaned up and feels easier to use.

I haven't experimented with junk mail yet.

The only thing I wish I could do in evolution is have just the email client, I don't use any of that other shit.

I use gentoo as well, so USE=-bullshit would be nice :)

Re:For Some reason...

[Amiga Lover]

> Of course it still looks like an Outlook clone...

That's something that's annoyed me with a lot of apps. What's with the gigantic fischer-price GUIs? are enterprise people attracted to that sort of thing?

Any Chance of

[mwagner_00]

Getting this ported to Windows??? I know alot more people would be using it if they did that.

Re:New feature list...

[killjoe]

I wonder how hard it would be to take an existing IMAP server and store things like the evolution calender and task list on it.

In the outlook/exchange paradigm outlook does most of the work. Why not do the same thing with evolution?

Outlook rip-off

[Mwongozi]

OK, this isn't meant to be a flame, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but...

The layout of that window on the screenshots is almost identical to Outlook 2003 [microsoft.com], right down to the buttons in the bottom left and the search bar at the top.

Open source shouldn't content itself with stealing good ideas, that's Microsoft's job. Surely we can come up with something innovative, and I'm not using the Microsoft definition.

Kmail

[thinkliberty]

One of the things i like about kmail is that Gnupg is intgrated in to it. Does Evolution support this?

GroupWise Client Support Added

[_Bunny]

It appears that Evolution 2.0 adds some aupport for Novell's mail system, GroupWise [novell.com].

There's an article in this month's Novell Connection Magazine [novell.com] on how to set it up, complete with a bunch of screen shots.

Novell added support to run the GroupWise backend on Linux recently (late last year or early this year, I can't remember). In fact, most of the GroupWise servers this year at Brainshare were running Linux instead of NetWare!

- Bunny

Re:Not ready for release?

[myc_lykaon]

That's a pretty fundamental flaw for a program that is supposed to be essentially an Outlook replacement.

Have you tried making appointments in Outlook for a date in BST while you are in GMT? It's a matter of luck if anyone turns up to the meeting. Time zone changing in a country as you move from summer to winter time? - Naaaah, never happens.

Re:Win32?

[Noksagt]

Great point, but cygnome [sourceforge.net] is a somewhat viable way of porting gnome apps.

Spamassisin Integration??

[Lispy]

What does that mean? Does that mean they just added some shiny buttons to it that do the filtering work automatically or did they *include* spam-assassin?

I am not totally clueless since I am running Evo 2.0 for about a week now but so far I couldn't get it to filter any junk. Can anyone clarify this issue?

Great news... but does it sync with PocketPC?

[B5_geek]

Yes, I know MS is evil but I have a pocketPC.

I have tried getting SynCE http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce/ [sourceforge.net] to work in the past with various mail clients on kde & Gnome (various distros too).

But I have never had any luck getting it to run. Does anybody know of any other app that will let you synce (preferable) evolution with a pocketpc running MS Mobile 20003?

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Jahf]

So if I read you and the parent correctly ... if I write an application that is not compatible with Windows it is inherrently not cross platform?

Let's see ... Evo runs on Linux, *BSD, Solaris ... probably on OSX if you take the time ... but it is not cross-platform?

I say bunk to that.

I agree that by not running easily on Windows (though there is always CygWin) the adoption rate will not be as high as it could be.

I would disagree that that is a bad thing.

And I would posit that there are probably statistically nearly as many Evo users out there today as Thunderbird. That will change ... but the vast majority of Windows users still use Outlook.

No, I don't have any facts to back up my last paragraph, but at least I know what "cross-platform" means.

Re:Mono?

[k98sven]

No.. there is no formal connection between Mono and Evolution, although both are products of Ximian.

A very good read is this [ometer.com] piece by Havoc Pennington, of GNOME fame.

Basically he says that there are ideas that integrating some high-level, sandboxed platforms like Mono/.NET and/or Java into the Linux desktop. (or more specifically, GNOME)

He also says that they're not going to use Mono or Java in Gnome (and where Gnome goes, Evolution goes) until there is some kind of road-map on which technology should be used and how.

Personally, I find Java more compelling. C# may be a nicer language, but there is no control over which direction the class libraries will take. The Java Community Process is at least a somewhat open alternative.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[daVinci1980]

God, I totally agree. I would use Evo in a heartbeat if it were available on Windows. (And no, I cannot switch, I develop products for x86/Windows).

To the other poster who suggests that it would not be possible, desirable, or easy to support cross platforms... That's total bunk. I used to develop commercial apps that ran on Windows, Linux, Mac/OS9 and OSX. It *does* require a bit more work, but in practice, it's actually not much more work than supporting one OS.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[moosesocks]

He's right! The look is downright depressing and simply lacks any sort of contrast.

'Default' should be good for 95% of all users. This default theme sucks, no offense to the developers.

The only colors used in the program are shades of grey and brown. Did they use the old DOS Doom color palate? The curved lines are a nice start, but they've still got to make it less boxy.

I'm frankly surprised at this, that the combined minds of novell and SUsE who have traditionally been rather good UI designers have let something like this be released.

Even the toolbar is cluttered.

For starters, draw all new icons. These ones suck from an artistic standpoint. Applications should be pleasant to look at. It makes users happy. Take a cue from OS X mail.app and change 'Send/Receive' to 'Get Mail' -- much more human-readable and less wordy. Group reply and reply-to-all under one drop down list similar to the one used for 'New' (but make that darn arrow smaller). Do you really need 'Print' on the toolbar? It's debatable, but you won't loose much functionality by removing it. Finally, 'Cancel' -- the button has no definite function. WHAT exactly are you cancelling? Why would you want to? Mail readers don't exactly do long intensive operations that one would normally want to cancel. 'Not Junk' is also unnecessary. If it's not 'junk', I think we can assume that it's also 'not junk' DUH!

The rest of the app ain't bad. It looks like most other mailreaders. The left pane is also nice, though the icons should all be redrawn, and the icons for Mail/Contacts/Calendars should scale to be as big as the buttons and be nice and visually appealing.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[daVinci1980]

Actually, no. There are a few places that differ a bit (user experience), but in general, the code just works. The trick is where your toolkit lies. Too close to the underlying APIs, and you're right--the software is for one platform, and simply ported to the other. Too far from the APIs, and you wind up doing everything twice.

Plus, it's open source. If the code worked even partially in a Windows environment, I'd probably donate a few hours a week to making sure that it really behaved on Win32.

Re:Mono?

[FuzzzyLogik]

I didn't say C# as someone stated. I simply wondered why they would choose to write mono if their own applications won't even take advantage of their own framework. Did they write it just to write it and waste their time or what? I would hope that Novell/Ximian would support their own framework and use it, and as stated sure would make things more platform independent.

Ultimately I just wondered why they didn't use it, that's all, no hidden meaning, no jokes, no nothing, just wondered why.

jeez...

[aggieben]

When are we finally going to see these office-suite types of software packages offer built-in support for PGP/GPG? For crying out loud...half the problems we have with email could be solved if people used PGP and a whole heck of a lot more people would use PGP if it were built-in to their email client; that goes especially for the web email services like hotmail.

Re:Cygwin!

[Spoing]

I don't believe it. Every 6 months I get excited when someone mentions Evolution for Windows being used somewhere...but when I look I'm disappointed.

Just now, I've searched the web for 2 hours and have come up with no other references except for a few comments on cobbled together copies a few people have been able to comple for themselves. None seem to be used for anything practical at this time, though.

In my searching, I found no packages for the X or Gnome-specific branchs of Cygwin. No stand-alone ports. Nothing in the main Cygwin package repositories. No binaries of any sort. No directions for compiling it from scratch or in part let alone 'just compile it from source after installing Cygwin'. Not even a short 'it works, but you have to build, configure, and install A, B, and C versions 1, 2, and 3'. Nothing. Silence.

The only thing that looks remotely promising is Evolution for Windows [sourceforge.net] -- and that project started three days ago.

Multisync

[Xhargh]

Does anyone know if multisync http://multisync.sourceforge.net/ still works with Evolution 2.0? I am using Evolution 1.4.6 and Multisync 0.82 and I will not upgrade Evolution until I know that it will continue to work.

Re:Cygwin!

[wizrd_nml]

No offense to the parent but please don't mod all these Cygwin posts up!!

Repeat after me: Running Evolution under Cygwin is NOT A WINDOWS PORT!!! Very very few people will fire up Cygwin and then Evolution every time they want to check their mail. Not to mention the effort required to install which Windows users are not used to.

A Windows port means it runs natively in Windows. Period.