Day: June 17, 2006

The demos on the N770 device reminded me of a blog entry I wrote six months ago. We are halfway, time for me to look back and do an evaluation:

These are the/my “free software” subjects that I have in mind for this year. I guess that in 2007 I will look back at this blog-entry of mine and laugh with the fact that none of my plans got achieved.

• Redesign and recreate osso-email…

That’s the part I’m satisfied with. Nokia and Kernelconcepts are working on Modest, which will be build on top of my tinymail framework. I’ve created a demo-ui that is (imho) better than the current osso-mail application on the Nokia 770. You can find demos here.

Modest will be available as a desktop, a GPE and a Maemo application. I have also started looking at the OLPC device and I’ve started porting tinymail (the framework) to it.

I haven’t been spending a lot time on building a libmainloop nor libcrack (hey Robert and Rob!) nor have I implemented deconf-spec yet (and people hate the idea without knowing what it is anyway) nor improving codegen nor dvfs nor gnome-schedule (but Gaute has restarted fixing bugs, I noticed) nor with replacing GtkHTML with Gecko in Evolution. I don’t know which topics will still interest me in a few weeks. I think my visit to GUADEC will tell. Of course there’s also some work to do for tinymail. But at some point I would like other people to start building applications with it. Give them the chance to learn it and contribute to it. I have been going quite fast with tinymail, indeed.

This month during my free time I will focus a little bit on improving my communication skills, attending GUADEC and course in a little bit more relaxed way keep improving tinymail. Note, you pronounce tinymail as tinni-mail. Not taainiemail.

I created two new tinymail demos. The first new one has some “go offline”, “go online” and some other tests. If you look carefully, you can see that I trigger a bug that causes the GNOME Hackers mailing list not to get displayed. Very strange. I guess I’ll need to figure out what was happening with that specific folder. Btw. I noticed that loading the summary file of a folder with > 15,000 headers makes the device unresponsiveness. I think (and hope) the mmap() idea will make a big difference for opening huge folders on the device.

The second new demo shows performance. First opening folders while being online, which takes longer because then the folders will be synchronized with the IMAP server. Then in offline mode, which shows the true speed of tinymail. Most folders in these demo’s have ~1,000 messages each. Without the mmap summary idea implemented, expect to load max. ~4,000 headers per active folder with tinymail on a Nokia 770. With the mmap implementation, the maximum amount will be at, I think (estimation), 50,000 or 100,000 headers per active folder.During the demo, I (for privacy reasons) tried making sure I only show spam and/or messages that are also public comments on for example my blog. If you see me searching for a message, I’m searching for such messages ;-).