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Java Programming Communications

Columba Developers Interview 13

Posted by timothy from the swing-'em-high dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Scott Delap's ClientJava.com has an interview with the developers behind Columba, an open source Java email client. They answer questions about Columba development and general Java/Swing issues desktop Java applications face nowadays."
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Columba Developers Interview More

Columba Developers Interview

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  • Article text, in case of slashdotting... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Xaroth ( 67516 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @03:58PM (#12997057) Homepage
    Columba - Java Email Client
    This site is temporarily unavailable.
    Please notify the System Administrator

    ...oh, wait.

  • I Hope It's Not Finished (Score:3, Insightful)

    by snookerdoodle ( 123851 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @04:12PM (#12997202)
    From TFI: "What I'd like to emphasize here is that, compared to Thunderbird for example, we target grown up users or business users. We follow strict user interface guidelines. We have predefined preferences, in comparison to ultimate configurability. Only the most important option can be changed in the UI. More advanced options have to be changed in xml-based configuration files manually. We try hard to make things as easy, yet powerful, as possible."

    Translation: "We'll make the gui so gui wimps can change the more advanced options later", or "what kind of idiot would want to change THAT?", or "It's not a bug, it's a FEATURE!".

    Seriously, I hate to rain on anyone's parade, especially someone offering Truly Free software, but I guess none of us are immune from spin-doctoring...

    Mark
    • Strict UI guidelines may not be a feature, but is most certainly not a bug. Maybe they shouldn't have said "grown up users", allright. The client looks great and works very well. In its Java context of course which means that there is no really tight integration with the operation system (windows xp in my case) features: rather slow menus, no cleartype, non-standard file open/save dialogs etc). It has potential to surpass thunderbird.
      • I was really referring to the implication that there are things that a user might wish to change that require editing an xml file to accomplish and acting as if that fact was a feature. It's possible, if not likely, that editing those files and making a simple typo could leave one with an unusable installation. Someone Truly Serious about UI Guidelines generally makes their app fit in with the platform. Firefox is an example of having at least some menu items where one expects them on the platform one is us
  • ...scoreboard is here [sourceforge.net], Columba report is here [sourceforge.net]. Not too bad, although there's some room for cleanup...

    Oh, and the duplicate code [sf.net] report is here [sourceforge.net].
  • Jeez, I'm used to reading plain out garbled sentences here, but this article (The actual FA, not the submission) does it on purpose (check for "hugh" instead of "huge"... appears at least twice...)

  • OSX 10.4: platform not supported... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by curious.corn ( 167387 ) on Wednesday July 06, 2005 @06:52PM (#12998663)
    ... so long for cross platform compatibility. Had it been SWT based I'd be more forgiving but supposedly it's swing based. Ok, so what was so un-java to require a compiled .so for it? Attachments? Mime helper associations? crypto? S-I-G-H, repeat after me: "Java is not .NET"! I'm still waiting for an email client that manages IMAP ACLs... (and evolution is the only one that does LDAP directory editing... grr!) I was curious to see if this java MUA did but (sigh), I'm a poor soul on a Mac, in a java-cross-platform-except-for-anything-but-M$-Lin ux... go figure...
    • had you read the article, you'd see that there are good reasons that they didn't go with swt.
    • Where do you get off saying "OSX 10.4" isn't supported? Then you bitch about cross-platform claims of Java? You are wrong on both counts. And even worse, someone moderates you up. The FUD around Java spread by the Slashdot crowd is deafening. And I'll likely be moderated down even though I'm giving accurate information in response to your disinformation.

      No, there is no OSX-labeled download. But there is a platform-independent download. There is a Zip file (don't pay attention to the fact that it say
      • Excuse me? Let me minimize Eclipse (yeah, fool) for a minute and answer to your jab. I'm a long time Linux tinkerer and cheap sysadmin so bash and tar -xzvf *.tar.gz doesn't scare me at all (that's why I switched to OS X in the first place). I did download the friggin' tarball or zip or whatever and did run the bloody jar... only to get a stupid "Platform not supported!" box. If you had enough neurons to _understand_ what I wrote you'd easily understand I was criticizing the authors of the program for screw

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