After some months of really hard work, I managed to take a look at one of the most annoying bugs people have found while using Modest. There was some problem in Tinymail with IMAP servers that do not support NAMESPACE. Basically users were not able to open their INBOXes, just the children mailboxes.
This morning I committed this long awaited fix. This bug was affecting among others people fetching mail from Oracle Beehive, Runbox, O2Online, and probably the most important one, GMX.de (German’s biggest provider of free email). Note that if you select GMX in your N900 it currently works fine because it uses the POP access as it is free of charge. IMAP access, the one that was not working, needs a paid account.
PS: as I mentioned in the bugzilla, you will get the fix with the next release of Maemo5 software.
These last weeks Dape and me have been working really hard fixing bugs in Modest and Tinymail here and there. Best Modest ever is coming.
But today, I don’t want to talk about fixes but features. I want to talk about BODYSTRUCTURE. This is one of the coolest features we could have added to Modest. Tinymail had some initial support, but due to the many bugs it had and the fact that some use cases were not supported forced us not to use it so far. But thanks to the time Igalia gives us for hacking we managed to get it working.
Oh wait! I didn’t tell you what BODYSTRUCTURE is about. Email messages are made of a group of MIME parts. One of them could be the subject, another one some footer and some others could be attachments. Without BODYSTRUCTURE support we were forced to download all those MIME parts when you wanted to see a message. This meant that if the message had some heavy attachments and you only wanted to see a small body with just a couple of words, you had to wait until the full message was downloaded,
With this new feature, we can download every MIME part one by one, and thus saving you time, disk space and specially if you’re using a mobile device like N900, money in your GPRS connections. Do you want to read only the body? No problem we’ll show you that you have some attachments but we won’t download them until you request us to do so. Do you want to forward the full message? No problem, we properly detect that and include the full original message whether or not it was completely downloaded before.
This will most likely be included in the next N900 software update that will be eventually delivered by Nokia. In the meantime, if you don’t want to wait just download packages and build it by yourself. Remember that you can find us in #modest channel @ Freenode.
We have been working hard last months in order to increase the speed of Modest. Summing up
- By default you will only see the last 250 emails on each folder. This dramatically speeds up the filtering and sorting of the emails. We can do this thanks to this great patch by my colleague Dape. Now we can do things like showing a “Show more messages” button, à la iphone.
- Several fixes in tinymail drastically reduced the amount of requests to the server that we needed to have a fully updated list of mail folders for one account. You will notice that loading the folders of a particular account is now much faster.
- Accounts window is now shown almost instantly (you will also see a cool transition effect that shows the last updated time). The trick? Just use hildon_gtk_window_take_screenshot()
And last but not least, replying to pure HTML emails no longer generates a distorted message.
Want more? Just get the code and contribute!
A couple of days ago while reviewing Modest status in giggle I got this nice picture:
isn’t cute?
I haven’t posted for some time as I was very busy with Modest and tinymail development. Most of you already know that Modest is N900 email application. We got very nice feedback @ Maemo Summit about the new UI so hope you all like that.
Talking about Modest, we’re working hard right now to improve its performance even more, and we’re achieving very nice results specially after Jose Dapena’s improvements in the tinymail’s folder list store model that we use to display mail folders.
Regarding tinymail, several changes are coming so stay tuned (BTW take the title of this post as a clue…)
What a great time we had yesterday. We invited friends and family to the new office opening party.
from Mario's gallery
There are a lot of pics about it, check them out here, or here or here.
BTW do you think we could ask for a place in this list?
UPDATE: links were wrong, now they should be fixed
If you want to chat with Modest developers you can find us in #modest channel, FreeNode IRC server.
Come and join us!
After a bit of work we can proudly announce that Modest was finally moved to the Maemo garage git repository. You can check it out here
Although is great to move to “our favourite DVCS”TM, the most interesting thing is that from now on we’re only developing in the public repository, so you’ll always have the latest improvements available.
Looking forward to your contributions!
It seems that a lot of people have decided to buy a Thinkpad X61s like many Igalians. Good news for us:
sergio@qi:~$ uname -a
Linux qi 2.6.26 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jul 16 17:34:38 CEST 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
iwl4965 LEDs working now. Thank you kernel hackers!
PS: BTW the kernel option is
Device Drivers->
Network Device Support ->
Wireless LAN ->
Intel Wireles WiFi 4965 AGN ->
Enable LEDS features in iwl4965 driver
