Columba 1.0 "Holy Moly" Released 279
Frederik Dietz writes to tell us that after three years of hard developement Columba 1.0, codename "Holy Moly!" is ready for general consumption. Columba is an email client written in Java that boasts a 'user-friendly graphical interface with wizards and internationalization support.' Slashdot covered an interview with the Columba team earlier this year.
Re:Typo (Score:4, Informative)
Follow the link (FTFL??) and confirm this.
Outlook look-a-like (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I don't get one thing (Score:2, Informative)
Today you see some business apps written in it and a fair number of server apps, but desktop java is completely absent. And frankly with Microsoft's .NET framework, I'm not sure Java even has much of a chance at that anymore.
Going to hell for this, but whatever... (Score:3, Informative)
That was fast (Score:4, Informative)
I downloaded and unpacked the application onto my laptop (12" PowerBook 1.33 GHz) and double-clicked the JAR file. Went to set up an e-mail account. (I like how the provided example is to set up mail for Bill Gates. Very professional.)
At the dialog whose instructions were
, I entereed my login and host name. I have an IMAP server, so I clicked the drop-down box where "POP3" was currently selected. No response. Clicked again. Nothing happened or changed. Clicked again and again.
Tried to set up a new mail account after the fact. POP3 is the only choice. As an IMAP user, Columba to me is nothing more than a broken Evolution clone.
Re:I don't get one thing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Going to hell for this, but whatever... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Written in Java (Score:5, Informative)
I can't run Azureus for more than a few hours without it eating all of my RAM and bringing down my entire system. I have 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap, and Azureus eats through all of it like lightning. When it does finally eat through my RAM and swap, my machine completely freezes, forcing me to hard-reset.
If I do manage to kill Azureus before it does that, X will hold on to the majority of Azureus' resources, making my system highly sluggish until I restart X.
It's a damn shame, because Azureus is the only BT client with an interface I can tolerate, but the sheer havoc it wreaks on my system is inexcusable.
Re:Written in Java (Score:3, Informative)
Just for another data point I run Azureus under Linux (FC3, JDK 1.5.0_02) for weeks at a time without problem. After 10 days of running, the thing right now weighs in at 187 MB. That seems kinda piggy for what I do with it, but my 1 GB machine is perfectly usable. Azureus reliably checks RSS feeds and downloads stuff automatically.
I wish it used less, but that's an entire $25 of RAM, so I'm not sweating it.
First impressions under OS X (Score:5, Informative)
I just downloaded and tried to configure Columba 1.0 under OS X 10.4.2. My verdict? Skip it.
The people behind Columba used some widget library that's system dependent. This is throwing a number of null pointer exceptions under OS X with the Java 5 JVM. They all relate to something called "jgoodies"; they're doing something that appears to be system dependent.
One of the main reasons for using this would be portability. They seemed to have missed the boat altogether since it doesn't run under an otherwise standad Java configuration! Why bother with writing a Java application if it's not cross-platform? Why use non-standard widget libraries? Attaining cross-portability in Java is hard enough as it is; these guys chose to make it even harder. Thank you for blowing away the only reason I might've had for using the Columba email client.
You can see a screen capture showing the exceptions here:
http://eugeneciurana.com/personal/images/Columba-
Can't say if this works at all because I was unable to tell Columba about my IMAP server. I got another of those jgoodies-related exceptions when I tried to select something other than POP3.
Cheers,
E