Virtual Reality

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

Seems that a lot of people are trying Modest and thus they want to report bugs and feature requests. It could be seen in Modest development page but just to clarify we have the usual couple of mailing lists

• modest-devel: for development purpouses
• modest-user: for Modest users

You can subscribe to both of them here.

There are many other ways to contact us like the public forum, the feature request system, or the bug tracking system (thanks Andre for pointing me out that starting today we’re using the maemo bugzilla, select “Communication” as product, and “Email” as component). So just use those channels of communication, we’ll try to help as much as possible.

Great day for Modest, in which it became the official email client of the Maemo platform. After a lot of months of hard work, I’m very proud of people that worked with me in this amazing project. Use it, test it and tell us what you think

Now I only have to convince Rufo to use it…

I’ve recently experiencing a very annoying problem when trying to update modules located in SVN servers using JHBuild. The error was something like this

svn: Network socket initialization failed

This was even reported as debian bug. But it’s not definitely a bug in SVN, the problem is located in the libgcrypt library used by SVN to deal with SSL enabled SVN servers. Being inside a JHBuild shell you’ll most likely have a LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable that will point to the location you setup as destination folder for the modules to build. So the svn command will use that libgcrypt and thus the error will appear.

It’s as easy as to wrap your svn command like this for example.

#!/bin/sh
unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH
exec /usr/bin/svn "$@"

Update: BTW jdub I’ve now a hackergotchi (thx pvanhoof). You can take it from here. It could be already seen in Planet Igalia

After a couple of weeks where I was really busy (FOSDEM included, BTW for those who don’t know me, I’m the blonde guy on the left) I finally managed yesterday to do the 0.0.8 pre-release of Tinymail. Read the announcement for a complete list of new features but I’d like to highlight these ones:

• .NET bindings
• Improved the cancellation support: cancel retrieval of messages, cancel retrieval of headers…
• Error handling refactoring
• Several bug fixes here and there (specially a very important one in the POP backend)

So, if you want to try the new features of tinymail just download the latest release of Modest. We didn’t release a new version last week because some of us were at FOSDEM, but you can now get the latest code. Things that you’d appreciate

• Fixed some crashes here and there
• Lots of tiny UI improvements: error messages, localization, performance
• Improved the support for non-Latin emails (mainly Chinese support)
• First partial implementation of an account setup dialog for the GNOME version

In general, people are telling us that Modest is becoming quite stable, so just try it and tell us what you think. Oh I forgot a couple of mandatory screenshots, this is how Modest looks like in my scratchbox

and the GNOME version as well

we have been interviewed by a private Spanish TV channel yesterday. They’re talking about benefits that companies offer to their employees, and Igalia has a lot ;-).

Check out the video (only in Spanish, hope that somebody will provide subtitles)

A year ago more or less, I started to work on a project called Modest that aimed to become the e-mail client for Nokia Internet Tables like the N800/N810. Other people from Igalia joined the team later like Dape, Berto, Felipe, Javier or Juanjo, and some of them are still working on the project. And yesterday the first Modest beta release was announced. I’d like to thank all of them for their effort and their commitment.

More or less at the same time I began to contribute to the Tinymail project leaded by the unique Philip van Hoof. Thank you Philip for providing us the APIs we wanted, for reviewing our patches and for your long e-mails plenty full of decorators, bodystructures, IMAP IDLEs and so on

And finally I’d like to thank Dirk-Jan because it’s a pleasure to work with you.

Talking a little bit about Modest, these are the features I specially like

• Modest is asynchronous: this means that the UI does not block while network operations are taking place, the UI is fully responsive while Tinymail performs the network stuff in the background
• Easy Setup: as Dirk said once, Modest is for humans. Just tell Modest where you are, your ISP and provide an username and a password and Modest will do all the hard server configuration stuff for you
• Connection specific SMTPs: when you’re at work, you access the Internet through your ultra-high secured intranet which allows you to do almost anything. You can only send e-mails using your company’s SMTP for example. But when you’re at home you want to send it through your ISP’s SMTP. Do you need two configurations? No, Modest can detect the network where you are connected to and use the proper SMTP for you with almost zero configuration.
• In Rome do as Romans, so if you’re human use your thumbs don’t use stylus!
• And finally Modest can be used as a desktop e-mail client as well. I don’t recommend it to you though right now, because it’s a little bit unmaintained but it’s been designed to be used in both Hildon and GNOME desktops, so be patient (and send us your patches)

So stay tuned, more about Modest is coming soon. BTW download and try it!