The majority of the bugs of that “it’s still a little bit buggy” quote of my last blog entry where caused by “gtk_tree_model_row_inserted” happening outside of the mainloop thread.
This has been fixed now, and since revision 1750 will the demo user interface utilize the feature.
Tinymail based mail user agents can therefore, like Dave’s excellent Polymer and Telomer, immediately start showing your summary while you are downloading it (not only after it finished downloading it).
With the Push E-mail support you will on top of that receive changes like incoming and deleted E-mail. Mail user agents based on tinymail can easily act on those events by updating the summary view’s model using build-in tinymail machinery (as this demo shows).
It’s also possible to know the X-Priority flag and soon it will be possible to have the message’s bodystructure upon those Push E-mail events. This will make it possible for your mail user agent to select ring tones based on this information. For example if your boss has send you an urgent meeting request, the mail user agent can launch a different ring tone.
And since you can base these decisions on more information than what SMS and MMS messages offer, I just gave the “big guys” at Nokia & co. a new feature for selling new phones! Tagging messages. I know, I know, I’m being naive by thinking that phones will someday ship with tinymail. Who knows? With tinymail, using folders of 10,000 messages fits in ~ 4 megs of RAM: modern phones have this amount of RAM already.
A big problem will of course be that SMS & MMS are more profitable than GPRS for the current mobile operators. I’m quite sure that will be an issue for “E-mail on phones” in stead of “SMS & MMS”. Let’s hope the Steve Jobs’s of our world will show those guys what today’s people really want.
These features need testing of course. They also need a real mail user agent to get fully fleshed out. People are today building one, but don’t let that stop you from creating your own mail user agent on top of tinymail. Although their project is about policy and although that policy might not be in line with your ideas, maybe you can join their team? Encourage them to design that policy in a flexible way?
They are your dreams. I’m building the framework to support them.