

Geary: New lightweight email reader for GNOME designed around conversations - amarsahinovic
http://yorba.org/geary/

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dignan
The Yorba Foundation is doing some pretty interesting work with limited
resources. They write well-designed apps with attention to the UI.

Shotwell and Geary are both written in Vala, a C#-like language layered on top
of the GObject system. It will be interesting to see how Vala matures. It has
always seemed like a messy abstraction, building it upon GObject, rather than
its own type system.

~~~
bratsche
Why should it build upon yet another type system? Vala was designed around
GType for a reason, so that it would not have to deal with the same language-
interop issues that occur with languages that use different type systems from
GObject. Vala originally compiled into C, so implementing another type system
in C that isn't GObject would be kind of silly.

If you develop in C#, Java, Python, or Ruby then you need a layer between GTK
and your language which can make their type systems work together. But Vala
was designed around the existing GObject system, and since it compiled
directly to C it didn't need much in the way of a glue layer, at least for
GObject-based libraries.

~~~
dignan
I agree that it removes some complexity there, but it also introduces some
ugliness for example:
[https://live.gnome.org/Vala/FAQ#Why_can.27t_I_chain_up_to_ba...](https://live.gnome.org/Vala/FAQ#Why_can.27t_I_chain_up_to_base_constructor.3F)

In fact, Jurg, the creator of Vala agrees on that enough that he created Dova:
<https://live.gnome.org/Dova> it's no longer actively maintained, but it
stands to illustrate the point.

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jedbrown
> we're planning to add lightning-fast searching

I don't see the point of discussing a mail client that doesn't have fast full-
text search that scales to a million messages. If it wasn't designed in from
the beginning, why should we have any confidence that it will actually work,
when so many still fail to deliver? I use Gmail and Notmuch, both of which I
think are best in class, yet are still only _barely_ fast enough.

~~~
Skywing
Your comment doesn't make much sense, to me. It's obvious that they've thought
about adding search to their client. What about it not being in, at launch,
makes you think that it'll be slow? Why is it not worth discussing the mail
client? We have a basic web app that we built at work that stores information
about tasks that our automated applications perform, so that we can monitor
them as they run. We added full text search to it almost six months after
building it, and search was a complete after-thought. We chose elastic search
and store about 12 million records in a small cluster. We add maybe several
thousand per day, on a busy day. This is not a large amount of records, from
what I've seen of other clusters. We easily average less than 200ms response
times of search queries across all documents, while testing it with about 100
queries per second. I don't know whether or not you consider this fast or
slow, but it's pretty snappy, in my opinion. So search doesn't seem all that
mystical and complicated to me, but maybe our scenario just makes it appear
that way.

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mike-cardwell
Can somebody with the patience to build this, try running it through
<https://emailprivacytester.com/> please and share the results here.

~~~
bonuoq
"DNS Prefetch - Link" turned red, everything else stayed grey.

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dguido
1\. Is Vala type-safe? Ie, can I exploit stack overflows in this?

2\. Does it support S/MIME or PGP?

3\. Can I configure it to view and respond only in plaintext?

3a. When not in plaintext mode, what this guy asked:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974983>

~~~
geofft
> Is Vala type-safe? Ie, can I exploit stack overflows in this?

Vala resembles C# most closely. It preprocesses down to C, and gives you a
great API to the GObject C object system, and in particular gives you good
access to glib, including its string, list, etc. libraries. It also is
intended to give you reasonable access native C libraries (optimized for those
that follow the GObject conventions, but not restricted to those) and has a
much richer type system than C.

I'm not particularly sure there exists a language where you can say that you
can't exploit stack overflows, but it's probably much harder than in your
average C application and on par with C#, Objective-C, Java, Python, etc.

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elmindreda
It wouldn't let me add accounts with unencrypted transports, so I can't
evaluate this program. The 'Continue' button just led back to the account
setup dialogue.

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argarg
Very impressed by the quality of this app although it's targeting GNOME. Only
thing missing for now it multi-account support...

~~~
buster
For me it's signatures ( <http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/5458> ) and a decent
full-text-search (on the roadmap). Only thing remains is what to do with
events/invitations..

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zura
It is interesting how they are going to monetize their software.

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dkuntz2
This isn't new at all... The latest version (which is still beta) was released
in October...

