On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 07:22 +0000, Philip Withnall wrote: > We currently have the other extreme: several different applications > each > have their own take on the address book (and then each have their own > different ways of integrating/syncing it with e-d-s). Why not just > have > one desktop-wide address book (I'm thinking Soylent here), and have > the > mail application use that instead? This would give us the opportunity > to > swap out the address book application in favour of other things if > necessary, such as an application which would use some web service as > an > address book.
I am not much aware of what Soylent is. So I cannot comment about using that atm. However, evolution-data-server is the system-wide address-book that will answer your needs. IIRC, eds exposes a dbus interface which can be consumed by any of the desktop applications, say Contacts, Gnome-calendar, OpenOffice, etc. Evolution-Addressbook (not eds) is just another client for the evolution-data-server addressbook. Probably Ross Burton can explain in more detail. > > IMHO a better approach will be to make the user choose what > components > > he want to see in his Switcher. Say if someone wants to use only > Mailer > > and Address-book, do not bother showing the Calendar component in > the > > switcher. > > But that's effectively like turning the components into plugins, and > then disabling some of them; it comes back to the problem that core > functionality shouldn't be in plugins, and you might as well split off > such plugins into separate applications. > > > Atleast for me, It will be far more useful than launching two or > three > > applications everyday morning (Mail/Calendar/Tasks) > > Isn't that what your startup programs list is for? :-P Yeah. I should have made it a little elaborate. Everytime I (or any corporate user) launches evolution, what I want to do with that is: -> Send/receive mails -> Accept/Decline/Schedule appointments -> Mark the tasks that I have completed, so my boss knows if it is worth paying me for. In addition to these basic activities sometimes I may be publishing my calendar etc. All these activities adhere to the Communication aspect of an office worker. And I do this atleast 4-5 times a day. Rest of the times I spend on gnome-planner, OO, vi etc. So opening three applications for this communication aspect, each time, may not be an appealing option. I do not say that it is bad/evil to split applications but IMHO it may be a better idea to have Gnome applications aligned/coupled on the lines user behaviors, bringing similar applications in a shell, but very-loosely tied. In the same way how OO has a Spreadsheet, Doc-writer, Presentation-tool. Just my 0.001 Paisa(1). though :) > > Regards, > Philip -- Sankar P (1) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paisa _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
