Ever since Nokia contacted me about improving Tinymail to make it suitable for their Modest E-mail client have they given me a reason to get up in the morning, to work on something of which I knew would someday kick ass.
With the Maemo5 based Nokia N900 device we’ll have Modest shipped by default, and Tracker being actively used by several of its softwares. Future is going to shine even brighter for Tracker. Hard to brag about it, Tracker is inherently a background thing. Ah, well, technical people know about it.
Having worked on Tracker for more than a year, I now understand Tracker’s potential. At first, while I was trying to make an API for- and store the summary of E-mail envelope headers, so that E-mail clients can access this in a memory efficient way, I was critical of this Tracker stuff.
But then I joined Ivan, Urho, Ottela, Martyn and Carlos who were working on Tracker. Later Jürg joined and at the Berlin Hackfest people like Rob Taylor, Jürg and Urho discussed replacing Tracker’s poorer own ontology with Nepomuk and replacing its query language with SPARQL.
Given the implied complexity I was again critical, but then that crazy Jürg guy in a few weeks time turned Tracker into 99.9% pure fine awesomeness. I quickly joined working on this crazy “vstore” branch. Since a few months we have convinced the other Tracker guys to just start calling it “master”.
Ever since I feel again like a student who is learning how to develop software. Jürg is utilizing so many good techniques and we’re implementing so many specifications that are just “the right thing to do”, that the beautify of it all could sometimes make me cry of happiness.
Thanks to creating the opportunity to develop on software that will be used on for example their N900 device, Nokia continues giving people like me a reason to get up in the morning.
Don’t tell the native Nokians, but that’s why the N900 announcements secretly also made me a little bit proud. To whoever of us that worked on this stuff: guys, we’re all doing a great job. Let’s make the next one even better!
Indeed. This entire N900 project was and _is_ extremely motivating. Doesn’t happen often that you work on the same project for that many month and still are highly motivated every morning.
Must be a great feeling to know that your work will get such exposure.
I’d always hoped that someday the Free Software world would produce something like the iPhone.
Nokia’s announcement made my day. Thank you for helping to make it happen. ^.^
Will Modest be part of the phone’s release or are u guys going to use something else? If not are u intending to revive Tracker’s Modest plugin? Am just curious.
@Tshepang: A plugin for Modest in Tracker is being considered for the next release of Maemo. For Fremantle I’m afraid this feature wont make it. Modest will indeed be the default E-mail client on the phone (as far as I know). I’m not involved in the development of Modest anymore. Sergio Villar and José Dapena are two people involved in the development of Modest. Sergio Villar is now co-maintainer of Tinymail, too (I still maintain Tinymail too, but a lot of the workload rests on the shoulders of Sergio at this moment). Modest indeed uses Tinymail as backend library and my relationship with Modest is that I authored Tinymail.
cool stuff. thanks