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.
the Java revolution... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am sure this was going to be groundbreaking 3 years ago when they started it. Ooooohhh...Java!
All joking aside, I am downloading it now to try it out. The screenshots make it look pretty decent. Although in the age of the new beta Yahoo! mail and Gmail it's going to have to be pretty damn good to get anyone to really use it I think.
Columba or columbia (Score:5, Insightful)
Columba, not columbia.
When the team embarked for these three years of develomment, they luckily didn't foresee that their 1.0 release would be announced on Slashdot with a spelling mistake in the name. Otherwise, they would have played videogames instead.
Why would I prefer this... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's still better than Outlook Express, that's for sure.
So why? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what features would entice to stop using Thunderbird and start using Columbba? I don't see it. On computers where I can install programs, I'd use Thunderbird. On others, I'd just be using a some version webmail client.
Re:Written in Java (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the year 2005, not the year 2000. Java isn't so kludgy anymore.
An email client is something you keep loaded all the time, but you still need most of the machine available to do some real work. Nobody without a ludicrous amount of excess hardware can afford to keep a Java application running that they're not actually using continuously...
Perhaps you should sit down and have a face-to-face talk with those half-dozen or so Azureus users.
You mean a non-managed language, like C++? Worked so well for MS Outlook -- and it's practically buffer-overflow, vulnerability-free!
- shadowmatter
Re:What is the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
How many would that be? I've used plenty of non-Java GUI's that were a slow, unresponsive mess.
Blame the programmer(s), not the language.
Re:I don't get one thing (Score:5, Insightful)
works on everywhere.
Please be sure and qualify your statement properly. It should read: works on everywhere where Java is.
Java is not platform independent. It is a platform as much as Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Irix, Windows, vxWorks and others are platforms. It just happens that Java has been designed to run on other platforms.
Re:the question I have (Score:2, Insightful)
Decent roaming? (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now, it's hard enough to find a client that supports writeable LDAP address books at all, let alone usably and with TLS and client cert support.
Alas, their website doesn't seem to have any sort of feature summary, so it's rather hard to say w/o grabbing and trying it out.
Re:Typo (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why would I prefer this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Having said that, I completely agree with your post. Java has many disadvantages (but watch out: if you say it on Slashdot, you'll often be modded Troll or Flamebait).
I agree with the other people. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why would I prefer this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why would I prefer this... (Score:3, Insightful)
So far, the rules that you can set in this software are far more advanced than those that exist in thunderbird. The GUI feels also feel a lot lighter and more responsive.
Why try this program? Because competition makes innovation. Do you criticise the Linux community for making a thousand distros?
Unless you use exclusively Open Source software I don't see how you can criticize Sun's JVM. Please remember that the next time that you play a video game or use an ATM.
Cheers,
Adolfo
IMAP (Score:4, Insightful)
Reasons why mutt still sucks as an IMAP client
- No IMAP server-side searching, sorting, threading
- Can't search across multiple mailboxes
- Can't download messages without downloading attachments
- Many settings are applied to ALL IMAP servers
- Overly-agressive checking of ALL folders by default (though this can be reconfigured)
- Can't flag IMAP messages on the server as deleted--only purges them
- No user-defined labels
- Can't store onfiguration on the server (pine and mulberry can. you say this is a good feature...)
- IMAP passwords are stored as plaintext
Reasons why Outlook Express has ALWAYS sucked as an IMAP clientRe:Written in Java (Score:2, Insightful)
[srdjant@tigerclaw ~]$ ps aux
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
[...snip...]
srdjant 4897 5.0 21.8 322352 112756 ? S 22:46 0:08
As can be seen from the 5th column (VSZ), the Java Virtual Machine eats up some 320MB. And this is
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_02-b09).
Yes it's 2005, and yes Java's kludgy.
I'm a dumbass and I'm okay, I code all night and.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? It's a simple fact. In C you can code programs that have buffer overflow vulnerabilities, format string vulnerabilities, memory leaks, and invalid type conversions. In languages like Lisp and ML, you cannot. That's what makes C unsafe and Lisp and ML safe.
Of course, you can write secure code in C and insecure code in ML. However, if you read vulnerability announcements, you will see that most of them are buffer overflows and string vulnerabilities (e.g. SQL injections that are possible because SQL queries are formed by concatenating strings). Both of these can be completely eliminated by using safer languages. This tells me that the distinction between safe and unsafe languages is a meaningful one.
Re:I don't get one thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Works on everywhere where the same version of Java is and there are no apps that don't require a conflicting version.
I worked at a place that dumped java because of that.. we needed 1.2 , some clients had other 1.2 apps that was fine.. then some clients got 1.4 apps which blew up if the 1.2 jre was present.. so we ported a version to 1.4 for them (took a couple of months - there are a *lot* of differences)... which broke all the clients that had apps that needed the 1.2 version.. so we ended up having to support both.
Re:Looks like Thunderbird (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice analysis.
Considering Columba has been around longer than Thunderbird, isn't Thunderbird a copy of Columba? Or, perhaps they both copy another client (Outlook Express)?
And since the Evolution icons are part of a open source product, why shouldn't Columba reuse them? Isn't that what open source is all about?
Re:Looks like Thunderbird (Score:2, Insightful)
While technically true, that's a pretty meaningless statement. Thunderbird is further development of the Mozilla mail client, which is a re-implementations and improvement on Netscape Messenger, taking you back far enough that the roots of it are probably older than Outlook.