Hi KMP, thank you for the nice words, it's always great to hear from our users that they like our tools and that they're interested about the general state of the project.
You're absolutely right, the mailing lists have been very quiet in a long time, which might convey that the project has somehow come to a halt. I can absolutely assure you that the exact opposite is the case. Our main problem at the moment is the time we can devote to this project, since we're still only 4-5 active people who are working on GPGTools and we can only do this in our spare time due to the free nature of our tools. At the moment we're trying to figure out some way to finance development, which would allow us to spend much more time on it than we already do. We have great ideas for the future of GPGTools and the absolute main goal has become to focus on simplicity of our tools in order to attract new and less savvy users to use secure communication and to also make them even easier to use for our long time users. We've started with the GPGMail rewrite for Lion, which was an absolutely necessary but also extremely extensive rewrite of the whole GPGMail plugin from scratch. We took the time to completely re-reverse engineer the entire Mail.app once again in order to find better entry points so we can adapt to new OS versions much quicker. In order to make using the plugin as simple as possible, we've eliminated everything that wasn't absolutely necessary from Preferences and from the entire UI of GPGMail and integrated it in a much less intrusive way into Mail.app The next step is to take each tool we're currently including in GPGTools and applying that same process to make them as simple to use as GPGMail. In order to handle the questions of our users on the mailing list more efficiently, we've transitioned to Tender, which has turned out great so far. I'd like to strongly encourage you to post any issues you might be having there, as well as any feature requests or ideas. We're trying to answer every question as fast as possible and other Tender users have been chiming in, interestingly creating a similar back and forth as on the mailing lists which for some reason have become very quiet already before we've introduced Tender. To better test and build our tools we've also setup a different build server which now provides the nightly builds (which aren't always nightly). As for announcements, a lot has been going on behind the scenes, but most of the time we've been working on the new version of GPGMail and so there weren't many. The best channel to follow incremental updates is on Twitter at the moment (http://twitter.com/GPGTools). Once we've managed to clear some time in order to define the next steps we'll definitely let you know via the announce list and we'll hopefully find some good way to keep everyone up to date. (If you have a good ideas on what platforms or ways to use to better communicate updates, we'd love to hear them!) As to the Mountain Lion topic, believe me, we're constantly thinking about that. With Mountain Lion Apple is introducing heavy sandboxing for applications from the App Store as you might know already, and despite earlier beliefs, they've also sandboxed all of their own applications which in fact means that Mail.app is also sandboxed. This unfortunately requires more code changes than previously expected. However we've already managed to add initial support to GPGMail and we're hoping to prepare a release not too long after Mountain Lion is out. So the next steps are: * Release of stable GPGMail 2.0 (yeah, it took us a long time, but we think it was worth it) * Release of a brand new website which is much cleaner and should be more welcoming. * Selectively release Mountain Lion GPGMail builds. * Figure out a way to finance GPGTools to keep this great project alive. * Make all our other tools as simple as GPGMail. Uh boy, sorry, this email is a very long one but I hope it answers your questions and gives you some confidence that the project is very much active, even if it's not always that obvious. Best, Lukas Am 17.07.2012 um 23:08 schrieb K. M. Peterson: > Lukas, Tim, > > +1 on your explanation of this problem; I'd guessed that's the case but was > still curious. I saw a lot of this as I moved archived email from gmail to > my own mailservera couple of months ago. > > And many, many thanks for everyone's efforts on the project. I really > appreciate the work that goes on towards perfecting the application. Perhaps > it won't reach perfection, but it's pretty damned good! > > This did raise the broader question that I have, which is that from my > perspective things have been rather quiet, and I'm curious about the general > thrust of what is happening with GPGTools. For example, as far as my inbox > is concerned, there hasn't been anything on the gogtools-announce list since > November. I _had_ missed the URL for the "appcast" that I presume is > actually an RSS feed (unless there's a tool that will automatically consume > this data and notify me of updates). > > I have miscellaneous very minor issues that on some level I suspect are > related to having a non-updated development/nightly version installed some > time back; but at any rate I try very hard to not create noise by asking > questions about topics that I really could have researched myself; this is > perhaps an example of that class except that I really don't know where things > are going nor how to keep up to date. > > And I certainly understand and agree with the idea of using a web-based tool > like Tender, but I just feel a bit out of the loop at the moment. (And, > speaking of loops, there's the presumably imminent arrival of Mountain Lion > that will probably create some commotion - I'd hope to get a heads-up on > that.) > > Again, none of this is in any way a criticism; if I was in a position to > contribute financially as I have to previous efforts I would be doing so. > But, as I said, it's been quiet, and perhaps I'm just not tuned in to the > right place? > > Hearing about the latest news - that'd be really great for those of us not > following the support site. I am following the RSS feed now, though. > > Many thanks! > > _KMP > > K. M. Peterson, Boston > http://kmpeterson.com/resume > 40 Stanton Road Contact > information, calendar, > Brookline, MA 02445-6839 LinkedIn, > Twitter, IM, Skype: > Phone: +1 617 731 6177 > http://kmpeterson.com/contact > > > On 17 Jul 2012, at 14:32 , Lukas Pitschl | Dressy Vagabonds wrote: > >> Hi Nicholas, Tim, >> >> as Tim already correctly mentioned we're slowly but surely moving all our >> tool related questions >> to support.gpgtools.org since it's way easier to maintain. >> You're still able to start discussions via email and reply to them solely >> via email. >> One reason for this transition was, that almost no one posted on the mailing >> list anymore. >> We've already answered a huge bunch of questions on support.gpgtools.org >> using the Tender >> support forum and most of our users really like it. >> >> As to your question, is there any chance you've recently updated GPGMail or >> GPGTools? >> Also are you on Lion or Snow Leopard? >> >> The reason why you're asked for your passphrase is, that Mail.app on Lion >> creates >> small preview snippets which you'll see in the second column, and to >> correctly >> create these for encrypted messages as well, the emails are decrypted. >> It's a bit annoying since the creation of the preview snippets occurs in the >> background. >> For that reason, we've not too recently added a preference which allows to >> disable the >> creation of those snippets. >> >> In order to disable the snippets, please install the nightly version of >> GPGMail from >> http://nightly.gpgtools.org. >> After that open the GPGMail Preferences in Mail.app and deselect the 'Create >> preview snippets' >> checkbox. >> >> If your problem still persists, we'll have to investigate further and it >> would be great >> if you could open a new discussion on support.gpgtools.org. >> >> @Tim >> >> You're absolutely correct, popping up a dialog box for a background task is >> terrible, >> but in GPGMail 2.0 which is a complete rewrite we've mostly adapted Apple's >> S/MIME >> implementation. >> This also resulted in this behaviour to be adapted which is used to generate >> the aforementioned >> preview snippets. The decryption is only in cache and the decrypted message >> snippet is not permanently >> stored. >> >> With GPGMail 2.0 we've started to focus more than ever to make the tools >> simpler and easier to use >> and I think you'll like the direction we're heading to. >> >> Hope that helps. >> >> Best, >> >> Lukas >> >> Am 17.07.2012 um 18:56 schrieb Tim Bradshaw: >> >>> On 17 Jul 2012, at 15:28, Nicholas Cole wrote: >>> >>>> My best guess is that it might have been the Mail.app plugin, but I >>>> hadn't received any gpg mails. Is there anything that might have >>>> caused Mail.app to suddenly attempt to decode messages in saved >>>> folders? Because of another bug, I had to delete Mail.app's cache of >>>> my IMAP folders this afternoon, so I think those caches have been or >>>> are being regenerated. Could that have caused the Mail.app plugin to >>>> attempt to decode a message? >>> >>> [I'm pretty sure no one is still alive here: I think they all went to some >>> web-based thing, as you do if you are supporting a tool for dealing with >>> mail.] >>> >>> If you're using Lion then the answer is "Mail.app can do this, and it's >>> probably related to indexing things, as you suggest". If I still cared >>> then I'd point out that: >>> - popping up a focus-stealing dialog box when you are not in the foreground >>> is just terrible user-interface style (I know, this is not unique to this >>> case); >>> - so Mail.app needs to decrypt my mail for its own reasons - what possible >>> good reason could it have to do this (for instance, is it indexing the >>> mail? because there might just be some security issues about an application >>> which thinks that is a good idea). >>> >>> But I think, sadly, this is all a lost cause. Note I'm not trying to be >>> rude to the GPGMail people: I'm sure they're dealing with application >>> frameworks designed by people who just don't care any more about users who >>> have anything but the most trivial requirements, and it's really hard to >>> get this stuff right. >>> >>> --tim >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Tim Bradshaw >>> t...@tfeb.org / +44 798 098 1475 >>> PGP: 53AA CFA7 553B C611 B984 C4F2 0F11 EA99 0B7A 5ED1 >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> gpgtools-users mailing list >>> gpgtools-users@lists.gpgtools.org >>> FAQ: http://www.gpgtools.org/faq.html >>> Changes: http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/listinfo/gpgtools-users >>> Unsubscribe: >>> http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/options/gpgtools-users/lu...@dressyvagabonds.com?unsub=Unsubscribe&unsubconfirm=1 >>> >>> This email sent to: lu...@dressyvagabonds.com >> >> _______________________________________________ >> gpgtools-users mailing list >> gpgtools-users@lists.gpgtools.org >> FAQ: http://www.gpgtools.org/faq.html >> Changes: http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/listinfo/gpgtools-users >> Unsubscribe: >> http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/options/gpgtools-users/p...@kmpeterson.com?unsub=Unsubscribe&unsubconfirm=1 >> >> This email sent to: p...@kmpeterson.com > > _______________________________________________ > gpgtools-users mailing list > gpgtools-users@lists.gpgtools.org > FAQ: http://www.gpgtools.org/faq.html > Changes: http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/listinfo/gpgtools-users > Unsubscribe: > http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/options/gpgtools-users/lu...@dressyvagabonds.com?unsub=Unsubscribe&unsubconfirm=1 > > This email sent to: lu...@dressyvagabonds.com _______________________________________________ gpgtools-users mailing list gpgtools-users@lists.gpgtools.org FAQ: http://www.gpgtools.org/faq.html Changes: http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/listinfo/gpgtools-users Unsubscribe: http://lists.gpgtools.org/mailman/options/gpgtools-users/arch...@mail-archive.com?unsub=Unsubscribe&unsubconfirm=1 This email sent to: arch...@mail-archive.com
