Another One Bites the Dust

January 26th, 2010 svillar 3 comments

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.

Categories: Hacking, Igalia, Maemo, Modest Tags:

Modest with BODYSTRUCTURE support

December 16th, 2009 svillar 17 comments

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.

Categories: Hacking, Igalia, Maemo, Modest Tags:

Speed, speed, speed !!!

November 11th, 2009 svillar 8 comments

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!

Categories: Hacking, Igalia, Maemo, Modest Tags:

The beauty of git

October 15th, 2009 svillar 1 comment

A couple of days ago while reviewing Modest status in giggle I got this nice picture:

Modest branches shown in giggle

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…)

Categories: Hacking Tags:

GCDS day #3 (a.k.a. GUADEC day #2)

July 6th, 2009 svillar No comments
  • Missed Xan’s and Alexander’s talks :(
  • Gave my speech about Modest (slides and video coming soon)
  • Had lunch with Quim, Ivan Frade and Andy Wingo. The VR stuff this dude is doing is really awesome. Have I ever mentioned that VR is my actual vocation? Pity what he’s doing is not free software
  • Jürg, the “yield” stuff in Vala for asynchronous operations is really cool
  • And finally ladies and gentleman, the unique, great and inimitable Lan Xópez and Hernando Ferrera (or was it the other way around ?). You were great again guys.
Categories: Hacking Tags:

GCDS day #2 (a.k.a. GUADEC day #1)

July 5th, 2009 svillar No comments
  • Arrived at the venue after a pleasant walk along the beach
  • Realized that I’m going to lose FreeFA cup because I leave on Thursday
  • Owen came with good ideas as usual
  • Finishing the slides of the speech I’m giving tomorrow with my colleague Dape. Bit nervous indeed.
  • Looking forward to atending Gnome party sponsored by Igalia
Categories: Hacking Tags:

Igalia’s new office party

May 27th, 2009 svillar 5 comments

What a great time we had yesterday. We invited friends and family to the new office opening party.

from Mario's gallery

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

Categories: Hacking, Igalia Tags:

Modest @ FreeNode

May 6th, 2009 svillar No comments

If you want to chat with Modest developers you can find us in #modest channel, FreeNode IRC server.

Come and join us!

Categories: Hacking, Igalia, Maemo, Modest Tags:

Modest Reloaded

April 28th, 2009 svillar No comments

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!

Categories: Hacking, Igalia, Maemo, Modest Tags:

Back from GUADEC

July 16th, 2008 svillar No comments

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
Categories: Hacking Tags:

Bad Behavior has blocked 16 access attempts in the last 7 days.