Mozilla Thunderbird

[Keith Irwin]

On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 11:59 +1000, CB wrote:
> Keith Irwin wrote:
> > On Sat, 2005-01-01 at 18:22 -0500, R S Gill wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > So, seems to me, that evolution is becoming an integral part of the
> > desktop experience, and my guess is that Ubuntu will want to encourage
> > that.
> > 
> > Keith
> 
> Am I alone in finding this pretty scary? I mean, it's exactly the kind 
> of thing I was trying to get away from in junking Windows. Where will 
> those of us who don't want enforcement of officially approved 
> applications go once this kind of 'shallow' integration gets fully 
> implemented?

I think they're trying to push personal information management down to
the library level such that, say, an "address book" or "contact manager"
is part of the infrastructure of the desktop itself, shareable by any
application, but not any more required than, say, GConf or dbus.

> Integration, on the desktop or network or anywhere, should surely be 
> done at the protocol or api level, or if that's not possible, just 
> abandoned. Remember the Halloween memo? Is the gnome team aping 
> Microsoft's 'de-commoditising'?

I'm not a good apologist for this sort of stuff, but I think that what
the evolution team is trying to do is commoditize, or refactor, a bit of
functionality.  In other words, the PIM stuff is a database, with the
email, IM, or other clients as user interfaces above that.  I'm thinking
it's what Gnome folks want in their goal of making things easier.
People seem to like that sort of thing in the Mac UI, don't they?

Keith