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List:       kde-i18n
Subject:    Re: konqueror components
From:       Teodor Romeo Mihai <teddy () piercom ! ie>
Date:       1999-02-16 15:04:52
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Waldo Bastian wrote:
> 
> Teodor Romeo Mihai wrote:
> > Well, I've been working for a few months now on a Outloook-clone for
> > KDE, handling mail/contacts/schedule/journal/notes/groups. It is a bit
> > different from all KDE applications I've seen, being very close to
> > Outlook in look&feel rather than KMail - which I find unusable.
> > If you are seriously planning to put mail in kfm, maybe you should
> > consider some kind of integration with an external mailer, in
> > Explorer/Outlook style.
> 
> I'm serious about integrating mail-viewing in Konqueror. (User point of
> view).
> 
> I think it is a very bad idea to put mail-reading code in Konqueror/kfm
> (Developers point of view).
> 
> Konqueror should be able to display mail/mailboxes by embedding a mail-
> viewer. This mail-viewer should (in the case of a mail-viewer) be a
> seperate application from a developers point of view, but should
> integrate
> seemless with Konqueror from the user point of view. This application
> can be kmail, a light version of kmail, or any other application that
> can display
> mails and supports this embedded KFM-view idea.
> 
> The technology to embed the mail-viewer should be something CORBA based.
> Most likely KOM/Openparts. (Simon, is this correct?)
> 
> It should also be possible to make this Outlook-thing (does it have a
> name?)
> integrate with Konqueror in the same way.
> 
> I am not sure what outlook is. But I have the feeling that Outlook is
> the kind
> of program that wants to do everything itself, and as result, does
> everything
> very poorly. (like Netscape Communicator which I use to write this mail,
> correct me if I am wrong)
> 
> Konqueror should do it better and the Unix way: Have speciliazed
> components
> which are very good in their task. Konqueror provides the seemless
> integration
> of them and provides easy navigation abilities.
> 
> Cheers,
> Waldo
> --
> KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
> http://www.kde.org



I'm sorry but I have to contradict you. Outlook is the best
general-purpose message organiser I have ever seen - and I'm as far from
being a MS fan as you can get. You're right indeed when you say that it
is the kind of program that wants to do everything by itself, but
strangely it manages to do that very well, and I can safely say - after
a long, hard look at Outlook, from a developer point of view - that it
is very far from Netscape and light-years away from KMail. We'll
certainly keep the same poor standards in applications (as we have today
in KDE) if we just say "yeah, M$ sucks", but please have a closer look
at Outlook. Apart from some really weird things, such as a clipboard for
cut&paste-ing objects with conversions (like I did in my clone, so you
can cut&paste contacts into mails, as vCard attachments for example),
you can find almost anything in Outlook. 
When I've started programming in KDE, I was very optimistic about it.
Now I know that the documentation is very poor, many basic things (like
the clipboard or the drag-and-drop) [barely] work, and that I have to
spend many hours reading KDE source code just to figure out how to use
some class or what's wrong with the mime-types etc.. but in general the
people are happy and thinking about CORBA and sophisticated things.. ;)
Sorry if this sounds sad but it's plain reality.

Regards,

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Teodor Romeo Mihai  [email: teddy@piercom.ie]
Development Systems Engineer at Piercom Ltd.
Eurotechnopole Building, Holland Road
National Technological Park, Limerick
Ireland
Tel. +353 61 201972     Fax + 353 61 335051

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