Tomorrow I’m leaving to GUADEC 2010. I’m goint to assist only on Thursday this time, when I’ll be doing this year GUADEC talk about Modest project.
This time the talk focus will be completely different, as I’ll be explaining the process towards Modest 4, where we’re focusing in intensive refactoring, with the goal of releasing a product quality in GNOME, Moblin and Hildon/Maemo5 platforms.
Also, I’ll talk about some differences between Maemo and GNOME platforms, and some bits I miss in GNOME platform:
- IP hearbeat (data transferences done in bursts to save energy).
- libosso-abook (evolution data server addressbook and telepathy integration).
- libalarm/alarmd (events scheduler integrated with dbus, and with support for waking up device).
- … etc, etc.
I won’t ellaborate too much, but I’m trying to point some weak points in GNOME platform we could improve (just taking free software Maemo components, or improving GNOME platform components).
The talk will be on Thursday, at 14:45 in Seville room.
One of the biggest things I’d love to see in Modest (apart from it being clearer whether it’s online or offline, and performance increases) is improved conversation/threading support. Nothing too complex, just grouped mails like in Gmail.
From UI point of view showing threads is really simple (I agree with you that the solution should be just grouping as it fits better with small screens). The main problem we have is that tinymail doesn’t store the reference field in the summary. Nothing that should take too much time, but we didn’t work on it.
About online/offline status, we rely on device applets for this, that already show the connectivity status.
In my opinion, what we really fail at is at providing tools to create rich user experiences for data driven applications, and ways to feed data from the web more specifically. This has a lot to do with the poorness of our platform when it comes to ways to talk HTTP, libsoup for example is not such a great API for application developers for many reasons.