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GNOME GUI Novell Communications

Evolution 2.0 Released, Screenshots 316

Posted by timothy from the yummy-looking dept.
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."
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Evolution 2.0 Released, Screenshots More

Evolution 2.0 Released, Screenshots

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  • Remarkably (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:09PM (#10367183)
    Evolution 2.0 was created in a mere 7 days (with 1 of them being for rest).

  • Needs more cowbell. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:10PM (#10367199)
    Actually, this looks so gray and bland compared to Outlook -- needs some color to spice it up -- even on the default theme.
    • 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

    • Re:Needs more cowbell. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ad0gg ( 594412 )
      I don't know why your post is modded funny. It should be insightful. Flashy interfaces mean a lot to people. How many people buy a car on the way it looks? Simple marketing, flashy interfaces makes product look well built. Same goes with websites.
    • But Icons ?! They are a waaay too small ... how can one expect an average user to hit 64x64 icon and not to miss ? Duh, just think about it.

  • Win32? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:11PM (#10367203)
    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... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ajiva ( 156759 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:11PM (#10367209)
    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...

    • Re:For Some reason... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:16PM (#10367252)
      > 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?
      • What's with the gigantic fischer-price GUIs? are enterprise people attracted to that sort of thing?

        Try running these "gigantic fischer-price GUIs" on a large monitor at a high resolution, and you'll instantly know why they are appealing.

    • Re:For Some reason... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Noksagt ( 69097 )
      Not as good as native, but 1.4 (maybe higher too) seems to run [ntwizards.net] on cygwin.
    • Of course it still looks like an Outlook clone...

      Not to mention that Outlook has an atrocious UI trying to do everything at once. Of all the MS apps to clone, Outlook is probably the best one to overlook.

  • Linux apps on Windows (Score:4, Interesting)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:15PM (#10367237)
    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.

    • But at what cost? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:30PM (#10367354)
      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.

      Yes, but as OS's (like OS/2 fer instance) found out, having that application compatibility can be a double edged sword. You might ease the transition, but you also potentially negate one of the motivating factors as well as providing your competition (i.e. MS) with a marketing edge (why switch because you can still run your "free" apps on Windows) and (Windows has tons of Windows only apps, PLUS it'll run the open source apps that count).
    • It would be great for folks to realize that writing applications in a cross-platform manner is not always possible or even desirable.

      Cross-platform applications require much work in maintaining that cross-platform capability. Not only that, but they must sacrifice potential features of operating environments for the sake of being cross-platform. Evolution happens to rely quite extensively on some of the advanced features provided by libgnome--which, coincidentally, isn't available on Windows.

      • Re:Linux apps on Windows (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Jahf ( 21968 )
        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 statist

    • Re:Linux apps on Windows (Score:5, Interesting)

      by daVinci1980 ( 73174 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:41PM (#10367882) Homepage
      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.

    • I think you are missing the point. Evolution (with the now free Connector software) can connect with Exchange servers for corporate mail, calendaring, etc. Thunderbird does not do this. In fact, I use Evolution for corporate mail, and Thunderbird for my personal mail. They are two different things, even though there is overlap.

      LS

  • New feature list... (Score:5, Informative)

    by dmayle ( 200765 ) * on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:15PM (#10367242) Homepage Journal
    It wasn't in the new feature list, but Evolution 2.0 is the one that's supposed to include the GPL'ed Exchange connector, as well as support for Novell's mail server (I forget the name.)

    • Re:New feature list... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by killjoe ( 766577 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:27PM (#10367331)
      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?

    • Re:New feature list... (Score:3, Informative)

      by SeaGK ( 620387 )
      evolution-data-server and the ximian-connector is what you are asking for. Includes support for GroupWise an several other "backends" (like MS-Exchange 2000/2003). They are a bitch to get installed on Debian, but Evolution 2.0 is much .... much better than 1.4.6 (Debian's official version), especially on stability of the exchange connector (Connector 1.4.7 crashes all the time for us), it's faster and looks nicer too.

  • I use it, like it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fire-eyes ( 522894 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:16PM (#10367247) Homepage
    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 :)

  • Any Chance of (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mwagner_00 ( 677196 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:17PM (#10367255)
    Getting this ported to Windows??? I know alot more people would be using it if they did that.

  • Night Owls (Score:5, Funny)

    by m0rph3us0 ( 549631 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:19PM (#10367268)
    2) Alarms don't work properly if Evolution runs past midnight

    Yeah. That is such an uncommon situation. I can't imagine the lack of forethought that went into the code to allow that bug to ship for a major version release.

    • Re:Night Owls (Score:5, Funny)

      by Frizzle Fry ( 149026 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:46PM (#10367483) Homepage
      They neglected to mention that it also has problems if you expose it to bright light and will unexpectedly fork(2) if you get it wet.

  • In case screenshot site slashdotted... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Open your e-mail client. Pull down every available menu. Select compose. Pull down every availble menu. Bring up prefrences. Select every tab.

    Ooooh. Aaaaah.

  • _some_ screenshots (Score:5, Funny)

    by Laxitive ( 10360 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:20PM (#10367280) Journal

    OSDir.com Apps Slideshow Back [ 2 of 84 ] Next


    84? Yeah I suppose some people might refer to that as "some screenshots". May I suggest
    "A fuck of a lot" as an alternate quantifier?

    :)

    -Laxitive
    • I loved watching the color of the e-mail address in the From and To fields change in each screenshot.

      It starts off blue, becomes black, then changes to green, then back to a dark blue, then bright blue again...

      I can only assume their screenshot program has... issues.

  • Anyone know if the Exchange Connector will work with this? I doubt it since the connector only works with 1.4 right now but you never know...
    • The answer to that appears to be in one of TFA's [gnome.org]

      http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/evolution/2 .0/evolution-2.0.0.tar.gz
      http://ftp.gnome.org/pu b/gnome/sources/gtkhtml/3.2 /gtkhtml-3.2.1.tar.gz
      http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gn ome/sources/gal/2.2/gal -2.2.1.tar.gz
      http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sour ces/evolution-d ata-server/1.0/evolution-data-server-1.0.0.tar.gz
      http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/libsoup/2. 2 /libsoup-2.2.0.tar.gz
      http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gn ome/sources/ximian-conn ector/2.0/ximian-

    • Re:Ximian Exchange Connector (Score:5, Informative)

      by daemonc ( 145175 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:39PM (#10367865)
      Not only will it work, but it is now included with Evolution, GPLed, and free of charge.

  • Document the EDS!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:24PM (#10367307) Homepage Journal
    All this new configurability and extensibility in Evo 2.0 is great, but what I'd really like to see is some better documentation for the "Evolution Data Server" (basically the Camel and Wombat API's). Ximian/Novell are hoping that the community will be excited about writing "snap-ins" to extend Evo's functionality, but what about those of us who would like to, for example, connect it to other back-end data stores? There's a "connector" for Groupwise and a "connector" for Exchange ... what if I want to write a "connector" for some other groupware server? (I'm asking this question because I do want to do exactly that.) These API's are barely documented. You have to reverse-engineer the existing connector code to get anything done with it. I'd like to see some real docs.

  • Not ready for release? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by linuxtelephony ( 141049 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:26PM (#10367322) Homepage
    I'm really disappointed. It seems they were in such a rush to release 2.0.0 with Gnome 2.8.0 that they left a pretty glaring problem.

    From their Known Issues: 2) Alarms don't work properly if Evolution runs past midnight

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

    I commend Novell for their overall Linux efforts, but rushing things to release for the sake of making a date with this type of flaw seems like a dangerous way to conduct business.

    It is things just like this that give some people enough pause to NOT deploy open source solutions. What was the earlier /. article about switching from Linux to Windows saying? Problems with programs, support, etc? Releasing a "stable" 2.0.0, exiting the beta 1.5.x series, and having a problem that prevents alarms from working properly if you leave Evolution running overnight certainly doesn't make me very confident.

    Hopefully 2.0.1 will be released VERY soon.
    • 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.

    • I haven't found alarms in Evo1.5 to work properly, either, so I've ignored them. But I've used the rest of the program. I like that option, weighing my own priorities. Just because they released it doesn't mean you have to use it, but if they' don't release it, you can't. I'm also waiting for the 2.0.1 release, but meanwhile, I'm using 2.0.0.
  • anyone happen to know how much email+attachments evolution can hold? I support users with Outlook PST files that easily get in the 2-3 GB range, and they prefer to archive as little as possible.

  • Outlook rip-off (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mwongozi ( 176765 ) <slashthree&davidglover,org> on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:29PM (#10367350) Homepage
    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.

    • So why was the parent marked redundant? He asks a very good question - Really, why is there so little innovation in Open source? There is lots and lots of partial re-implementation of existing stuff, usually not quite as good or complete as the thing they are copying, but very, very little which is new and exciting. Brushing questions like this under the carpet by simply moderating them as redundant is not the answer.
      • It was marked redundant because someone made the exact same point a couple of posts up.

      • Re:Outlook rip-off (Score:4, Insightful)

        by earlytime ( 15364 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:27PM (#10367776) Homepage
        do you really want to know?

        it's beacuse that's how most progress is made, in very small increments. Linux was born to be incrementally better than minix, then made to be incrementally than *ix, then *ix, and so on. Now Linux is arguably the best unix out there (depends on your needs). A good side effect of open source code, is that anybody can make small changes that improve the overall package. Over time, these small moves add up to a huge advance over the original.
        Apache is a perfect example, it was not just an incremental improvement, but originally a straight copy of ncsa; take all those little patches, and package them into one tarball. Ok, it's not spectacular, but it's better than ncsa. Continue this process over 9 years, and you have not just the most popular, but an extremely stable, lightweight and portable web server.
        It's rare that you see a major development, especially within a specific area. Consider the fact that even software powerhouses like microsoft, sun & orace are all focused on developing new iterations of old ideas ( vms, unix, SQL). These three products/technologies are at least 20 years old, yet they still drive the software industry. Even Intel is milking a 30 year old product, the integrated microprocessor.

        refs:
        http://www.computerhope.com/history/unix. htm
        http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaySt ory.c fm?story_id=2724348
        http://www.apache.org/foundat ion/faq.html#what
        http://www.oracle.com/technolog y/oramag/oracle/03- may/o33drdba.html
        http://inventors.about.com/libr ary/weekly/aa092998 .htm

    • Re:Outlook rip-off (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Phleg ( 523632 ) <stephen@touset.oTIGERrg minus cat> on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:02PM (#10367596)
      If I recall, this was innovative when they first came up with the idea several years ago, in order to distance themselves from Outlook. Once again, it would be Microsoft that took the idea, not Evolution.
      • Do you have any links to back this up? I'm geniunely curious and not just trying to call you out on something.

      • Re:Outlook rip-off (Score:3, Insightful)

        by spectecjr ( 31235 )
        If I recall, this was innovative when they first came up with the idea several years ago, in order to distance themselves from Outlook. Once again, it would be Microsoft that took the idea, not Evolution.

        Outlook 95 - released in, unsurprisingly, 1995 - has the GUI that Evolution has today. Evolution wasn't even started until 1999. The first version copied the Outlook 98 GUI down to the letter.

        Later versions include the Outlook 2000 Dashboard features.

        Evolution 1.4.6 (the version before today's released
    • Jesus Christ, who barfed on that monitor? Is that the Outlook 2003 default theme? God, I thought only Visio was broken enough to use that. Did the entire QA department at MS get their eyes gouged out or something?

  • Kmail (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thinkliberty ( 593776 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:32PM (#10367376)
    One of the things i like about kmail is that Gnupg is intgrated in to it. Does Evolution support this?

  • GroupWise Client Support Added (Score:5, Interesting)

    by _Bunny ( 90075 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:33PM (#10367387) Homepage

    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

  • Spamassisin Integration?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:38PM (#10367432) Homepage
    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?

  • 6 download components? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by simetra ( 155655 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:39PM (#10367433) Homepage Journal
    This is what bugs me about installing Linux apps... the ASSLOAD of separate stuffs you have to download, configure, build/install. Why not just bundle everything up nicely? OpenOffice manages to do this.

    BTW., anyone else notice that newegg.com has been dead for a few hours?

    • >This is what bugs me about installing Linux apps... the ASSLOAD of
      >separate stuffs you have to download, configure, build/install. Why not
      >just bundle everything up nicely?

      Diffrent people diffrent roles. The folks here code, and give the source code to the world. It's up to someone else(such as e.g. your distro vendor) to package and make it install/work nicely. If noone has done that yet, well, there isn't that much to do about it.

    • Why not just bundle everything up nicely?

      Why not indeed!

      If the Ximian Red Carpet or rpm binary update thing isn't your style, you might want to take a look at garnome [cipherfunk.org].

    • Why not just bundle everything up nicely?

      Without the dozens of interdependent components, GNOME just wouldn't be GNOME.

    • This is what bugs me about installing Linux apps... the ASSLOAD of separate stuffs you have to download, configure, build/install.
      That's why you as a regular Linux desktop user wait until your favourite distribution starts to ship the app and do the downloading, configuring, building and installing for you.

  • Bible Belt (Score:4, Funny)

    by Performaman ( 735106 ) <Peterjones&gmail,com> on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:39PM (#10367434)
    I told a Southern Baptist friend about this, and she said I was going to hell.

  • Great news... but does it sync with PocketPC? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by B5_geek ( 638928 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @05:41PM (#10367455)
    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?
  • Evolution 2.0 is part of GNOME 2.8, both new releases in the past week. So now would seem like a good time to upgrade both. And Debian itself is within spitting distance of releasing Sarge, its first major upgrade in about 2 years. So upgrading the whole thing ought to get a machine right on top of the product lifecycle. But how do I do that?

    I tried the new debian-installer iso (CD image). Broken package dependencies aborted the "Desktop environment" install. And I couldn't resolve them for upgrading to G2

  • Best Calendaring out there... (Score:4, Informative)

    by freelock ( 755655 ) on Monday September 27, 2004 @06:24PM (#10367758)
    I just got Evo 2.0 set up on my laptop, with the new Mandrake 10.1. While I've been having trouble getting my Palm sync'd correctly, I have to say, the new calendar feature is great.

    You can subscribe to the same web calendars used by Apple ICal and Mozilla Sunbird/Calendar. But you can also drag events to a personal calendar, where you can synchronize it with a PDA. You can select any set of calendars to publish for Free/Busy (it looks like it can merge multiple calendars, but haven't tested), and you can then attach the URL for your calendar to your VCard, send to other Evolution recipients AND Outlook users, and they can see when you're available to schedule a meeting.

    I've been waiting for these features for months--it promises to be the best of all worlds for calendaring. Now to see if it delivers!

  • How about hooking up with the GPL version of Open-Xchange? Does that achieve parity with the MS Outlook/Exchange combo, while letting sysadmins replace MS Exchange with something GPL, without the Outlook users even noticing the switch? Is the Outlook/Evolution wall finally broken?

  • jeez... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aggieben ( 620937 ) <aggieben@NOSpAM.gmail.com> on Monday September 27, 2004 @11:37PM (#10370275) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Multisync (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Xhargh ( 697819 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @12:50AM (#10370693) Homepage
    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.

  • Evolution 2.0 has been released... (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_germ ( 146623 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @04:31AM (#10371546) Homepage
    ...2 weeks ago! Congratulations!

    Didn't anyone notice this was released as part of GNOME 2.8?

    Wow, wait! GNOME 2.8 is out? Jeez...! ;-)

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