Handling mime parts, integration with for example Dates

A month ago I had this funny idea that the tinymail 1.0 API was not going to change significantly.

Strange that I have these ideas.

Anyway. I changed something significant. I changed the entire concept of viewing mime parts like attachments, pgp signatures, e-mail bodies and other mime parts.

There have been two to do items on the tinymail development pages. One about integration with Dates and one about having PGP support using for example Seahorse.

Both Dates and Seahorse are of course optional and probably will have to be changed to another something on your specific device. Don’t worry, I know that; Maybe indeed you have a in-house calendaring software installed on the mobile devices? Maybe you simply don’t support it? Maybe you want to upload meetings to a service on the Internet in stead of registering them with the calendaring tool on the device? I don’t know. Nor will tinymail know. But you will make it know about that.

I do know that there are a lot people, a lot devices and a lot possible situations to support. I also know that we have this one certainty in the IT industry: the simple fact that everything is going change sooner or later.

So the idea is to let you implement your own TnyMimePartView types. Possibly by inheriting mine but definitely not necessarily. You can, as with all tinymail types, implement using just interface and don’t care about whatever I cooked for you. Maybe you want to implement it using ASP.NET by letting it render a web page?

Tomorrow some stupid company x invents a new mime part that it uses for … I don’t know, calendaring or whatever. Adding support for this new mime part is simply going to be as difficult as implementing a new TnyMimePartView and registering it with the TnyMsgView.

I will soon create a TnyMimePartView implementation that will ask you whether or not you want to store an attached meeting request in Dates and another one that will verify a PGP key using, probably, Seahorse. They will, as usual, serve both as examples and as the implementations that will probably also be used by Modest on the Nokia 770.

One step closer to having an integrated PIM on your cute Nokia 770.

Oh btw. Bart reassured me he is still working on the .NET bindings for tinymail. Like all of us, he’s busy with his daytime job and building his house and stuff like that. I guess we will have to exercise some patience. The Python bindings are of course still functional.