I released yesterday ReSiStance 0.5 with some bug fixes and two new really cool features:
OMPL Import/Export: moving from other clients to ReSiStance should be easier now, and you can use the export feature also to backup your feed lists.
Feed auto-discovery: this is THE killer feature of this release. Currently it uses the syndic8.com services. Just type a couple of words and ReSiStance will give you back a list of feeds that could be interesting for you. Just select the ones you like the most and voilà, ReSiStance will automatically setup them for you.
These two really nice features were developed by a University of A Coruña student called Chus Picos as part of their master thesis. She did a really great job and is currently working on some other great features I will talk about next time. So Chus congrats and thanks for the great work.
I have released ReSiStance 0.3 (in case if you wonder what about v0.2, it is just that I didn’t blog about it, but it was released on Monday). I don’t know how it could happen, but I totally overlooked the presence of WebKitGtk python bindings in the Maemo repos by the time I started to code ReSiStance. I decided to move to WebKit as soon as I noticed my mistake, specially knowing all the cool features of WebKit Gtk port from the Igalia mates hacking on it.
These are the more remarkable changes since v0.2.1:
HTML rendering is now WebKitGtk’s business. It performs blazingly fast, much more than GTKHtml, you’ll easily notice that.
Feeds list can be sorted
Added application settings
Auto load images
Default font size
Portrait/Landscape modes
You can see all of them in action in this screecast:
After all the hard work required to release Modest and Tinymail I finally found some energy to start a new pet project. I have never really liked the RSS reader that comes with the Nokia N900 Igalia gave me. I looks too “Diablo” and it’s not consistent at all with Fremantle look&feel.
That’s why I decided to write my own and, at the same time, regain contact with Python. The result is ReSiStance 0.1.
I’m really proud to announce the release of Tinymail 1.0. New packages are available here.
It has been more than 3 years since the project started, and after all the hard work we think now it is time to release the first version of our beloved framework to build e-mail applications for mobile devices. Thank you very much to all contributors! Specially thanks to Philip, Dape, Dirk-Jan and Rob, you all rock guys!
It is already being mentioned in the official announcement I sent to the tinymail devel list but I would like to highlight the main achievements of this release since the previous 0.0.9 pre-release:
New widgets to show the mailboxes tree as a plain list
New widget to expose only the latest messages of a mailbox
New download external images capability
Complete rework of IMAP IDLE
Improved namespace handling in IMAP
Locking, security and connectivity improvements in POP3 code
Improved MIME parsing (PGP/GPG parsing now works)
New asynchronous methods for getting folders and messages
Upated Vala & Python bindings
Improved support for 64-bit architectures
For those of you having a Nokia N900 this release contains more or less the same code shipped within your device (remember that Modest, the email program, is tinymail powered). For all people that followed the progresses in tinymail I blogged about recently (here, here or here) you will have to wait for v1.2 release. I promise you won’t have to wait that much…
Thanks to the hackfest time Igalia gently gives me every week I could resume the work I had previously started to add ENVELOPE support to tinymail.
What’s this stuff about? Well basically what we can do now is ask the server for ENVELOPE instead of fetching a random set of headers (like ‘From:’, ‘Subject:’ …). Why is this cool? For several reasons:
Speed: IMAP servers do cache ENVELOPE information so they do not have to inspect every email message to extract the requested headers. They can give you ENVELOPE blazingly fast (I run a rough test and downloading a folder with ~1500 headers from AOL IMAP server lasted twice the time of downloading ENVELOPE and BODYSTRUCT, and this means minutes).
Bandwidth: ENVELOPE is smaller in size than headers as the name of the headers is not transmitted over the network
Future: RDF storage support in tinymail is now closer
Last week we received a very kind visitor. Tomeu Vizoso, maintainer and developer of several Sugar core modules, came to our office in A Coruña to share with us his ideas and to talk about the current status of the project.
Tomeu Vizoso @ Igalia
In a hole, creating technologies that help children and try to change education is really a very beautiful goal. We were shocked when Tomeu told us about the size of deployments in some countries of South America, keep rocking guys.
There are some myths and misconceptions about the OLPC project. One of them is that almost everybody uses Windows on their OLPCs. The fact is that almost nobody want Windows in their laptops and most of the teachers are asking for Sugar powered devices.
I talked to Tomeu in order to know what is the status of email in Sugar, and he replied that they do not have any solution yet. So I proposed him to try to get Modest running in Sugar as the current look&feel of the pure gtk+ version seemed to fit very well into Sugar’s UI experience.
In the Sugar UI you don’t have exactly applications. They call them activities, and you could have activities like read, write, chat or browse Internet. Having a single window per activity is highly desirable, and stuff like modal dialogs are almost forbidden.
Then I built tinymail and modest using current Sugar libraries (pretty easy BTW as they use very well known GNOME technologies). Here it is the result, note that is not fully “sugarized” and that the platform misses some icons here and there but it looks nice for just a short hackfest session.
I have just submitted a couple of patches (this and this) to Tinymail that add Moblin to the list of supported platforms.
Basically the main addition is the TnyMoblinDevice, it’s an object that allows every application that uses Tinymail to use the connectivity services provided by Moblin’s Connection Manager.
In order to build Tinymail for Moblin you just need to use --with-platform=moblin in the configure process.
Some people have already complained about the way GMail IMAP works. With great power comes a great responsibility. Google guys, you have one of the largest email services in the world, so this means that you have to care a lot about users and clients. Dape recently reported and error in how GMail creates the body structure of some particular messages and still got no answer.
Now I found that it does not return the full bodystructure of a multipart/mixed with two refc822 messages in it. If this sounds strange to you, it’s basically how Mozilla Thunderbird creates an email with two other emails as attachments. GMail simply will not tell you about the structure of the two attached emails.
Bodystruct support in Modest is working in most cases although these problems with GMail will most likely mean that it won’t be shipped with the next software update for the N900.
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.
