Virtual Reality

So, do you think that this is telepathy? Come on, check this out. This is the real (mmm, maybe virtual?) telepathy

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for two years, and I was (and I still am) very comfortable with it. Especially I like very much how it manages multiple pop accounts, the themes and mainly its speed.

But now, for some reasons, I began (again) using Evolution. I need it because its great integration with the GNOME desktop, and because it has some features that I need, for example, tasks and appointments management.

Despite Evolution has a lot of features, I think that the mail client application has nothing to do with Mozilla Thunderbird. Some examples

• Thurderbird differentiates between unread mails and new mails, with Evo is impossible to know if an unread message is old or new without comparing dates. Thunderbird notifies you with some graphical artifacts
• My pop accounts have their own Inbox,Sent,Trash etc… in the Thunderbird. I can’t do it with Evo (yes I know that I can use the virtual folders but it’s just a workaround, for example the sent or trash folders will be still global)
• When you have new messages in a thread, and the thread is contracted, Thunderbird shows you that you have this new messages by underlining the first message of the thread while Evo just shows you this first message as it was unread
• The thread view of Thunderbird is really nice and very attractive to the eye, it’s not as easy to identify threads in Evo
• The UI of Evo is too complex just for sending emails, maybe some UI work is needed
• And finally Thunderbird is really fast, I know that Evo is more than a mail client but the difference between these two ones is too big

I’m some other points that I don’t currently remember. I don’t want to say that Thunderbird is better than Evo, this comparison is neither an usability report nor a serious study I’m just, talking about some stuff that I miss in Evo. Evo has some other amazing features, for example, I did today a copy&paste from a wiki page with tables to a new blank mail with an unbelievable level of accuracy, I was really very impressed.

The first half is over, the second half must be played, who’ll win?. Ladies and Gentlemen place your bets .

A few weeks ago I have been working with the libgalago library by Christian Hammond. If you don’t know what is libgalago take a look at this article of the Linux Journal. Basically galago is a library that provides presence to applications.
This library had a little performance issue. libgalago uses DBUS for getting/setting presences, and all the calls through the bus were synchronous. Imagine a device with low resources, for example the Nokia 770, that uses libgalago. It could be that if you have a lot of contacts, an application that uses libgalago could get stalled due to it should wait for every call to the bus that requests for presences, contacts, services …etc.

I implemented an asynchronous implementation of three common libgalago calls:

• galago_get_service
• galago_service_get_account
• galago_account_get_presence

These new asynchronous calls created new race conditions, because they could need some data that could be freed before the call to the function was made. So it made sense to implement another function galago_cancel_call that cancels an asynchronous call.

I sent the patch to Christian Hammond and he accepted it. It seems that he thought that it could be very interesting to add more asynchronous calls in the future, so he made some refactoring in the library code instead of applying the patch directly. Now you can use the asynchronous calls of libgalago because these changes are merged in the HEAD of the libgalago repository.

Happy presence