(LinuxWorld) -- If you've been reading my column for some time, you know I'm not a big fan of Ximian, Miguel de Icaza's fascination with Microsoft .NET, or Ximian's Outlook clone, Evolution. If you've been reading Joe Barr's columns for some time, you'll have seen his repeated praise of all three, especially Evolution.
I never liked Evolution despite the fact that Evolution does not involve any of Ximian's attitudes or technologies that I find offensive. Several things turn me off about Evolution. First, no matter how much I tweak the GNOME and GTK themes, Evolution (and amost all GTK applications, for that matter) range from plain to just plain ugly. Granted, this is purely a matter of taste, but KDE and Qt seem so much more flexible and attractive to me. In addition, Evolution crashed too often. Finally, for my purposes, Evolution didn't offer any advantages over my favorite e-mail client, Mutt.
Nevertheless, I have a lot of respect for Joe Barr's opinions, so I figured there are good points about Evolution I overlooked. I spent the last two weeks looking for them. Here are my conclusions.
Searching for reasons
It should be against the law to use POP3 for e-mail, and in anticipation of that law, I've used IMAP4 for many years. Fortunately, Evolution does more than a reasonable job of handling IMAP4 mail. My only mistake at first was to tell Evolution to scan all folders for new mail at startup. If you have as many folders and as much mail as I do, this will force Evolution to take an eternity to start. Once I disabled this option, Evolution began to start up very quickly.
On the surface, it appears as if there's nothing spectacular about Evolution in comparison to Mozilla mail. To be fair to Mozilla Mail, if you dig deep enough, you can find most of the features you'll find in Evolution. However, I prefer the way Evolution integrates things like the advanced search features into the default graphical interface. You can search the body of messages, the subject, the subject or body, or select from a number of other combinations. It not only makes it easier to perform these sophisticated searches, it makes it plain to the user that these searches are possible. One might never discover the advanced search features of Mozilla Mail, simply because you have to search the interface before you can search your mail.
The virtual folder feature is an especially dandy addition to the search mechanism. You can define and save a set of search criteria that will create a "view" of only the subset of messages which meet your search conditions. From that point on, all you have to do is click on the virtual folder to see the current subset of matching messages. You can create as many of these virtual folders as you like, but the number of virtual folders can begin to get overwhelming if you go overboard.
The wrong job for the tool
One of the reasons I was unfairly unimpressed with Evolution is that I have the wrong job for the tool. I use IMAP4 e-mail, manage my own calendar and never the twain do meet. Unfortunately for me, some of the best features of Evolution stem from its ability to integrate calendaring with messaging, and even replace Outlook without losing many, if not all of the group calendar and scheduling features of Outlook.
Even if you don't have Exchange or an Exchange replacement as your back-end server, Evolution is still a powerful client for scheduling meetings with others who have similar tools. It's just not something I do, so I admittedly cannot appreciate Evolution as much as it deserves.
As for the calendar, address book, tasks, and Palm Pilot synchronization features, what can I say? With one exception, Evolution is so much better than anything else I've seen on Linux I have little choice but to use it even if only for these features. The only exception is the first Pilot synchronization created duplicates of almost all of the contacts in my address book. This happened to me numerous times before, and I never understood why it occurs. It is extremely tedious to step through the duplicate addresses and delete them. (You can sometimes avoid problems like these by carefully manipulating backups, but that's a whole 'nother story.)
Granted, Evolution doesn't have much competition in this area. I've used Jpilot for a long time now. It is certainly a full-featured and useful Personal Information Manager (PIM), but if you could find the expression "brain-dead interface" in any dictionary, I guarantee you'll see a picture of Jpilot.
In fact, the Jpilot interface has improved so little over the past years that I've been trying to switch to the corresponding KDE utilities almost monthly. Applications like Korganizer are much more attractive and and easier to use. Despite my best efforts, I've only just gotten Korganizer to synchronize its data properly with my Palm Pilot Vx after several failures. I don't even know what I did wrong before and right this time, and that's not how anything should work. With the exception of duplicating addresses, Evolution synchronized everything with my Palm Pilot on the first attempt.
The address book, called "Contacts" is much easier to navigate than most others I've used, but it could use a lot of polish. I'd like to toggle through various views of the data without having to use the menu. When I change the width of the columns of contact names, I want Evolution to remember that setting.
A dead-end toolkit?
As a KDE user, I did what comes naturally to try to add some icons to the tool bar to switch between address contact views. I right-clicked on the tool bar to get to the tool bar configuration menu. But it doesn't exist. In fact, it doesn't exist for any GTK or GNOME-based applications that I know of.
Before I elaborate why this is important, let me reiterate a complaint I've voiced in the column before about Evolution and every other GUI e-mail client. None of them I've used let me program macros to make my work easier. Mutt, the character-based e-mail client I use most often, lets me create a macro for just about any occasion. I've programmed Mutt to drop the current message into the "Read" folder when I press Ctrl-R, for example. That barely scratches the surface of Mutt. You can make it do a long string of tasks and assign them to a single keystroke.
What does this macro capability have to do with tool bars? One of the best ways to integrate these features into a GUI application is to make the features a standard part of the GUI toolkit you used to build the application. The KDE libraries and Qt libraries (upon which KDE is built) make it relatively easy to equip almost any application with the ability to customize its tool bars. Trolltech is busy adding application scripting to Qt for the next release, which will make it easier to automatically add macro and more sophisticated scripting capabilities to applications built with Qt.
If KDE and Qt are an ideal foundation upon which to build a better application than Evolution, why doesn't such an application exist? I have a theory that such applications will explode onto the scene eventually, but I'll save that for another column.
For now, suffice it to say that these superior KDE and Qt applications do not exist. Until they do, I'd say Evolution beats the pants off any competing IMAP4-capable e-mail and personal information manager application I've seen. I take back most of the criticisms I've lodged against it and give it a hearty thumbs-up. I may even use it more often than Mutt eventually.
While I still have problems with Miguel de Icaza's attitude about .NET and I doubt if I'll become a GTK or GNOME fan anytime soon, I must admit that I'm an Evolution fan at last. Miguel or someone else at Ximian should write our columnist Joe Barr a thank you note. Because it's all Joe's fault that I've finally come around.
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