If you want to test Mailody 0.4.0rc2 you can now simply use the “klik://mailody” Klik-package.

There are currently 0 open bugs, which is simply not true. Please test Mailody and report bugs. The people who have done it know they will be solved very, very quickly.

There are also Debian Unstable packages available, As there are not a lot of dependencies, they will probably run on every .deb-distro. Get them here.

In other news, we are still struggling with a tooltip problem in Mailody. We want to show more information about a mailbox, we tried a tooltip when hovering over a mailbox, but that was irritating. Then we tried an icon in a second column, but that was to much in-your-face. Now we have a “.” in a column and on click it will popup more info. Very cryptic, but not irritating or very much in-your-face.

If you have a good idea, let us know.

We also have a drawing problem, the first three icons in the standard toolbar are not rounded off at the top properly. So if you can help us solve that, please leave a comment, mail me (toma at mailody.net) or jump in #mailody.

And we really need a usability guru to help us….

Last weekend at the KDE-nl meeting I gave another Mailody demo, I usually leave presentations to others, and now i’ve done wice in one week. It seems you can control your nerves better when you know what you are going to talk about..

Some people were surprised by the current state of Mailody. That makes me wonder if I’ve made this point clear in my last blogs… Mailody is completely usable.

So, if you are looking for an imap mail client, give it a try, you will be surprised, I promise!

If you see any bugs, hop into #mailody and report them. Frode M. Døving or me will fix them.

Say you started a project and started an IRC channel for it. One of the nice features cia.navi.cx provided were irc bots. On every commit to your project, a bot announced it in the channel.

When I started Mailody I requested such a bot, but did not receive an answer. Yesterday an automated answer was in my Inbox. It stated that I could now setup and maintain that bot myself. So for everyone who wants a bot in their channel announcing the commits to their project, follow these steps which can be done in less than a minute if you are fast enough:

• Go to http://cia.navi.cx/account and register.
• Choose bots on the left and Add a bot, pick freenode and fill in your channel name.
• Set it to ‘Custom filter’ and go to the ‘Advanced filtering’ tab
• Fill in this piece:

  <and>
  <match path=”/message/source/project”>kde</match>
  <find path=”/message/body/commit/files”>mailody</find>
  </and>
  <formatter medium=”irc”/>

• You will see the bot joining the channel and starting announcing when there is something to announce.

You can not use the Filter by project on the basic filtering tab, as all apps are in the ‘kde’ project, so you need the ‘Ruleset’ as given above.

Before I had any coffee today I talked to Will Stephenson, and he made me aware to an existing concept of detecting offline and online network status, something I immediatly added to the todo list of Mailody.

Just before lunch I talked a bit with Till and Ingo, in no-time I could verify some concepts I use and made some discisions. Like there already is an existing kdepim-wide system of mail profiles. That means I could hook up to it and use the profiles the users have defined in KMail and KMail can use the profile that the user configures in Mailody. That’s neat.

During the siteseeing through Osnabruek – we just wanted to walk two blocks for the lunch, but that was extended a bit (and thanks to helpfull people on the street we continued to walk the wrong direction). Anyhow, during the walk Till explained how the threading works in KMail, how it is possible that KMail loads the headers so fast and some other tips. So I was glad we walked wrong.

After lunch I did some coding, I noticed some bugs which were annoying – not being able to send mail is extremely annoying. Because I was not on my own network, I needed to authenticate to the server. And that was broken. Still is, because I forgot my ssh key to commit stuff.

Tobias started at 17u an explanation about akonadi for the ‘new’ people who were not there yesterday. It was interesting. One of my goals was to see if I could help out anywhere. It’s pretty clear to me that Akondi is developed by super intelligent people who have thought this over and over, based on years of experience. I’ll see if I can do something, but for now I leave it in good hands.

When that was done, I was up to show Mailody. I showed some of the nice parts, like threading, tabs, composer with sidebars, etc. It was all received very well and there were good and reasonable questions. They made my day by applauding at the end and indicating that Mailody would be an option to move to kdepim when it grows out of the playground area (although that needs to be discussed on the ml, because not everyone (like Allen Winter) was there.

We also had discussions about how kdepim fits in the workflow of big companies and about all the different websites, but I’m sure others will give an update about that soon. And we did the group photo thingie.

Then it was time to go home again. It was great to be there, meet the group and all those great people.

A bit late, but stuff i wrote yesterday and have not had time to post earlier:
————-
Arrived at the kdepim meeting. Picked up Adriaan from Deventer and after checking in into the hotel we joined the group.

The group was already discussing the current state of Akonadi, but the drawing on the whiteboard and Tobias tellling about it made it pretty understandable quickly.

The meeting got disturbed by the fact that there was a deadline for people to check in into the hotel and dinner. I hope we can continue tomorrow.

During the nice dinner there were nice conversations about tire punctures by odd (no, it was even) prime numbers, but also about alternate algorithms for viewing mail and the different habits people have while dealing with mail. It is interesting to hear how people all have different views on how they prefer to read email where they want to store sent messages and stuff. You simply can not satisfy everyone. And trying to do so will simply make your application fail for all users in the end.

Unless akonadi can provide a framework that it will be easy to write a mailclient. Just insert a couple of treewidgets, a view pane, connect to akonadi and all set… O better go to sleep now, already dreaming…