Geary: New lightweight email reader for GNOME designed around conversations

by amarsahinovic • 14 years ago

64 16 14 years ago

dignan2• 14 years ago

The Yorba Foundation is doing some pretty interesting work with limited resources. They write well-designed apps with attention to the UI.

Shotwell and Geary are both written in Vala, a C#-like language layered on top of the GObject system. It will be interesting to see how Vala matures. It has always seemed like a messy abstraction, building it upon GObject, rather than its own type system.

bratsche• 14 years ago

Why should it build upon yet another type system? Vala was designed around GType for a reason, so that it would not have to deal with the same language-interop issues that occur with languages that use different type systems from GObject. Vala originally compiled into C, so implementing another type system in C that isn't GObject would be kind of silly.

If you develop in C#, Java, Python, or Ruby then you need a layer between GTK and your language which can make their type systems work together. But Vala was designed around the existing GObject system, and since it compiled directly to C it didn't need much in the way of a glue layer, at least for GObject-based libraries.

dignan2• 14 years ago

I agree that it removes some complexity there, but it also introduces some ugliness for example: https://live.gnome.org/Vala/FAQ#Why_can.27t_I_chain_up_to_ba...

In fact, Jurg, the creator of Vala agrees on that enough that he created Dova: https://live.gnome.org/Dova it's no longer actively maintained, but it stands to illustrate the point.

argarg• 14 years ago

Very impressed by the quality of this app although it's targeting GNOME. Only thing missing for now it multi-account support...

amarsahinovic• 14 years ago

I agree, and it seems it is planned for version 0.3 http://redmine.yorba.org/projects/geary/wiki/Geary_roadmap

buster• 14 years ago

For me it's signatures ( http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5458 ) and a decent full-text-search (on the roadmap). Only thing remains is what to do with events/invitations..

zura• 14 years ago

It is interesting how they are going to monetize their software.

jedbrown• 14 years ago

> we're planning to add lightning-fast searching

I don't see the point of discussing a mail client that doesn't have fast full-text search that scales to a million messages. If it wasn't designed in from the beginning, why should we have any confidence that it will actually work, when so many still fail to deliver? I use Gmail and Notmuch, both of which I think are best in class, yet are still only barely fast enough.

tree_of_item• 14 years ago

This is a free software mail client written for GNOME, so the point of discussing it is largely political. I don't think their goal was to compete with Gmail on technical merit.

Skywing• 14 years ago

Your comment doesn't make much sense, to me. It's obvious that they've thought about adding search to their client. What about it not being in, at launch, makes you think that it'll be slow? Why is it not worth discussing the mail client? We have a basic web app that we built at work that stores information about tasks that our automated applications perform, so that we can monitor them as they run. We added full text search to it almost six months after building it, and search was a complete after-thought. We chose elastic search and store about 12 million records in a small cluster. We add maybe several thousand per day, on a busy day. This is not a large amount of records, from what I've seen of other clusters. We easily average less than 200ms response times of search queries across all documents, while testing it with about 100 queries per second. I don't know whether or not you consider this fast or slow, but it's pretty snappy, in my opinion. So search doesn't seem all that mystical and complicated to me, but maybe our scenario just makes it appear that way.

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

Can somebody with the patience to build this, try running it through https://emailprivacytester.com/ please and share the results here.

bonuoq• 14 years ago

"DNS Prefetch - Link" turned red, everything else stayed grey.

elmindreda• 14 years ago

It wouldn't let me add accounts with unencrypted transports, so I can't evaluate this program. The 'Continue' button just led back to the account setup dialogue.

dguido• 14 years ago

1. Is Vala type-safe? Ie, can I exploit stack overflows in this?

2. Does it support S/MIME or PGP?

3. Can I configure it to view and respond only in plaintext?

3a. When not in plaintext mode, what this guy asked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974983

geofft• 14 years ago

> Is Vala type-safe? Ie, can I exploit stack overflows in this?

Vala resembles C# most closely. It preprocesses down to C, and gives you a great API to the GObject C object system, and in particular gives you good access to glib, including its string, list, etc. libraries. It also is intended to give you reasonable access native C libraries (optimized for those that follow the GObject conventions, but not restricted to those) and has a much richer type system than C.

I'm not particularly sure there exists a language where you can say that you can't exploit stack overflows, but it's probably much harder than in your average C application and on par with C#, Objective-C, Java, Python, etc.

dkuntz2• 14 years ago

This isn't new at all... The latest version (which is still beta) was released in October...

Geary: New lightweight email reader for GNOME designed around conversations

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