Day: April 15, 2008

I noticed that more and more people from several specific cities are visiting Tinymail pages, and I know at least a few companies and organisations who are using Tinymail right now.

My personal opinion on development frameworks is that if they come without documentation, they are worth as much as vaporware.That’s why I started first, at an early stage, with writing the API documentation of Tinymail and then Tinymail’s trac, which holds a collection of examples and on top of the API documentation also explains most of its types and how to use them.

This was not sufficient. I wanted to write a test E-mail client to find the source of bugs in Modest. While I was doing that I decided that this test E-mail client was going to be documentation too. Documentation in the form of source code that itself required documentation.

I started TMut’s trac to deposit that documentation. Yesterday I mentioned that I implemented simple account management in TMut, today this is ~ finished. Here is the documentation about that source code.

New items:

• TMut’s account store
• Account manager
• Account editing

Former items:

• Creating messages
• Select a folder window
• TMut’s menu, its first screen
• Showing the summary of a folder
• The message view component

You guys remember TMut? It’s an E-mail client for small screens that uses Tinymail. It serves as an actual E-mail client, as some code that you can use to peek at while developing your E-mail client and as a piece of code where you can derive your stuff from (although TMut’s current build is not set up to build TMut’s classes into a library, you could easily do this and then subclass TMut’s high level components).

What makes TMut unusable for non-software developers is that it has no account management. You need to do that in for example GConf (depending on what implementation of TnyAccountStore your TMut uses).

At Modest we need to test Tinymail’s account management capabilities without executing all of the extra code involved in what Modest does whenever you manage its accounts. Therefore I started putting in place some code to have basic account management in TMut.

It’s, as usual with the things that I blog about, unfinished.