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Visual Feature Changelog Mailody 0.3 -> 0.4 |
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Written by Tom Albers
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Sunday, 04 February 2007 |
There are a huge number improvements made between version 0.3 and 0.4. As nobody really reads the changelog, let me go through them and provide screenshots of the changes. So, if you're bored already, just look at the pictures (click on them to see them in the correct size) and read when you want to know what it is ;-)
Let me start by stating that I've got a very limited set of people which I mail often. So it made sense to make it possible to get to those addressess quickly. So whenever a message is sent, I store some information in the database about that. With that information we can show some utterly useless statistics, like:
But also we use it usefull, when holding down the 'Compose new message' button it will show you a menu with the addressess of the current message (that's for the 'o-now-i-see-a-message-of-you-i-needed-to-mail-you-anyhow'-case) completed with the addressess you have used the most, so it can look like this:
While looking at the first screenie, you can see the recent sidebar shows all the recent addresses, the 'Addressbook' sidebar shows your KDE Addressbook and there is also an 'Add Attachment' sidebar, so you can quickly access the file system to add an attachment, although most experienced user will simply drop the file on the composer I guess. Anyhow they can all be collapsed, so it will not take space when you don't need it.
The message 'preview' pane in Mailody 0.3 was a QTextBrowser. It did its job nicely, but in the end I wanted to be possible to load external images, and I love Konqueror, so I changed it to a KHTMLPart. An additional advantage is that it also allowes to print html. In 0.3 printing was limited to the plain text part of the mail, which can give funny results when there is no plain text part, you will basically get all html on paper. So now it will print what's on the screen: plain or html or html with external images. Talking about those options, we made shortcuts to switch between them:
In the status bar you can see 'HTML' and 'Ext.', just click on them to switch to plain or to turn off the loading of external images.
We made some adjustments to the tabs, you can now open mails in a new tab by using the middle mouse button to click on a header. Also when you have a link to a website in a mail, you can middle click it, it will open the website in a new tab, so you dont need konqueror for each link in a mail.
Deleting messages is a two stage process in IMAP, first you flag a message to be deleted, after that you can purge the folder so it will actually be removed from the folder. In Mailody 0.3 it was not possible to hide deleted messages, so you were constantly purging the folder to keep it clean, before purging it looked like this mostly:
In 0.4, it is possible to hide those deleted messages, so you don't see them. But when you use the quick search you probably want to search through those as well, and when a new message arrives in a deleted - but not purged - thread, you probably want to see those as well, so now the mailbox can look like:
You can see a reply has arrived to a message I deleted before, the deleted message is shown for reference. When I delete the reply, both will dissapear from the list. In the deleted message you can also see the 'To: email address' construction. This construction is used when you are the sender of the message.
We added an option to setup the check interval for new mail. 0 will disable the mail check interval.
Another key feature is the possibility to use signatures, you can set them up per identity and indicate if you want the signature at the top or at the bottom. In the next version of Mailody we will add the possibility to use 'smart' positioning, so for replies you probably want the signature at the bottom, but for messages you forward you probably want the signature at top...
Now some answers to the most frequently asked questions:
Q. When will there be pop3 support?
A. When someone writes it and is willing to maintain that part. I dont use pop3, so I can not implement and maintain it.
Q. Why is there no Kontact integration?
A. I tried, but ran into so much problems and bugs that I reverted it. As soon as there are more developers and someone interested in working on it and maintaining it, it will get added again.
Q. Is there any pgp support?
A. Nope. It's very difficult to do it right. As soon as there is a simple library, with clear examples and it fits the structure of Mailody, I will add support for it.
Q. Akonadi?
A. Yes, when that arrives.
Q. Are you using the IMAP-kio?
A. No, I decided to write my own layer for that. It gives me the possibility to implement the IMAP push protocol, where you no longer have to poll to see if there is new email, but where the server pushes that information. Hopefully that will be in Mailody 0.5 or 0.6.
Q. Qt3 or Qt4?
A. Qt3. I will port Mailody to Qt4 3 months before KDE4.0 will be released.
You can see more genaral screenshots in the Screenshots area. The detailled changelog also contains a list of fixed bugs and small, less visible features. I hope you liked this quick overview. Please try Mailody and tell us what you think!
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 28 March 2007 )
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