My little Tinymail is becoming like a small fire that I just need to keep burning. Various people are contributing both large parts and small improvements to it. We’re releasing pre-releases and those are working increasingly well. I received less requests for improvements based on the pre-releases as expected. It seems most people are still using ‘trunk’ to learn about Tinymail. At GUADEC a lot of people told me that if there would be just a release, they would start using it. Well, now there are releases (although, pre-releases), yet I’m seeing no significant differences here. The ‘release often, release quickly’ mantra is not always true, it seems. I rather think that if a project is useful, it’ll be used. If not, it wont. Full stop.
To increase users of Tinymail I think that in stead of rushing to make a clean release I rather have to focus on supporting it on SymbianOS and WinCE, showing that you can build a client with it (which is what Modest is doing, and more likewise clients will follow soon), support higher programming languages and models and having good documentation. In other words: adding value. In the end is “a release” just a wrapper for that value in my opinion. Although I believe that for packagers and distributions “a release” by itself add a lot of value.
I already know what I have to do to create more site visitors: making fancy looking video demos, being part of GMAE and its press releases, getting my blog aggregated on the planets, being mentioned by Lortie (+4000 unique visitors that day!), providing easily browsable sourcecode (you’d be surprised to know how many people seems to be just reading Tinymail’s code via the trac source code browser daily) and again having good documentation (increases the hits coming from search engines). Just a lot of visitors is not really what I’m seeking for as the project maintainer. Rather people who’ll either contribute, learn from the code (the browsable-code visitors) or people who’ll want to use it for their own projects.
To get more contributors I try to get as much companies involved as possible. The major contributors to Tinymail (other than me, of course) so far have been Codethink, Nokia, Openismus and Igalia. Let’s try to get some more such organizations interested. I would love to see more individuals like contractors, students and hobbyists getting involved. I just have no idea how to get them to be interested. I think the problem is that creating an E-mail client is usually a project for a small or medium sized team of people. Although with Tinymail’s API available in higher programming languages will this be doable as a one person activity. Or, that’s the idea.