Tinymail has attracted a few contributors. This made me think about documentation.
I mostly created documentation about contributing to the tinymail framework. I didn’t focus so much on documentation about using Tinymail being an application developer building an E-mail client on top of it. I know it’s usual the other way around. Both types of documentation are in my opinion equally important. They should be mixed a little bit, because application developers should be inspired to learn how to adapt the framework. For example by implementing a new implementation of an interface.
There is the API reference manual, of course, there are a few demos and samples and the tests directory contains a few interesting tests too.
But no manual-styled documentation nor a lot of that stuff on the trac pages. Some trac pages are manuals about contributing to the tinymail framework. Like debugging, like how to implement a type and how to inherit one (those last two ones are indeed very useful for application developers too).
I hope that the people working on Modest will change that a little bit. If time permits, I will start writing manual-style documentation myself too.
If companies are interested in improving the tinymail framework, but are unsure how, paying somebody to write this type of documentation is a good way to overall improve the project and make it gain more interest at the application developers.
Another investment in the project, that is hard for the current developers, are of course language bindings. Those are hard because they imply having to learn a lot about the target language itself too. I have a detailed description about how to do a Perl binding, how to do C++ ones and the java-gnome author is very interested in helping anyone who wants to do Java ones. Python bindings are already done (which implies that there are .defs files being generated, which makes for example doing java bindings much more easy).
Cool typical mobile features are going to happen. Features like partial message retrieval, service discovery for SMTP servers and merging and backing up of already-received E-mails. They are, as they say, on the immediate agenda and will be worked on in a near future.
Of course, if you feel an urgent need to start writing documentation, then go ahead. It’s a very interesting way to learn how to use tinymail as an application developer. I will fully support you and I will most likely join your little documentation project. Let me know.