I’ve started writing a feature overview page. This is meant for first-time user’s who want to check quickly if Columba supports a certain functionality. Of course, this is going to be placed on our website, including some nice screenshots.
Additionally, this is going to be merged with Why use Columba.
Contributions are welcome!
Our bug day didn’t went out as good as expected. Sadly, we didn’t get a great number of testers. Nevertheless, we were able to solve a couple of very critical problems and finished many features.
Most notably Timo integrated JDIC (https://jdic.dev.java.net/) for the trayicon support and opening attachments with the system’s default applications. Also, the cleaned up message viewer component is now capable of viewing attachment’s contents inline.
So, all in all we are really satisfied with the work done and are much closer now to a RC3 release. We are probably doing another test release next weekend.
Next Friday, the 7th Jan we are going to have a bug-hunting day. And we need your help to find all those bugs, annoyances and ui inconsistencies.
Timo and me are going to be present in IRC, QuakeNet, in the channel #columba. Additionally, also of course in the mailinglist and the forum here (http://columba.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=support).
We are going to release another Webstart testing release and will do so several times on Friday. This way users can easily test if their reported bugs are fixed correctly without the hassle of a new installation or repetitive updates of Columba.
Hope you join us!
First of all there’s the new filter toolbar. Note, that we now offer complete search functionality inclusive full body search, etc. This is possible because we don’t rely on the Table Model anymore. Instead we use the vFolder search functionality. This way your search is automatically saved as a child vFolder of the “Search Results” folder.
And then the “view attachment’s contents inline” message preview component. This is of course an optional feature. What you actually see here is a message which contains another message as attachment. This is a pretty common case, when forward a message as attachment, which is the default in most email clients today. This also works when using text or image attachments, which looks really sexy 
I’ve just commited a fix for current CVS. It didn’t compile cleanly when using ant.
Now, everything should compile cleanly again.
I’ve spend a whole day cleaning up the message preview component. The code is now much easier to read. Additionally, its now possible to use a composition-like approach when handling different views. So, you can view messages in messages recursively.
Additionally, I’m almost finished with the “show attachments inline” viewer, which directly shows attachment contents if an appropriate viewer is available.
Screenshots coming real soon!
I did some prototyping on the weekend and integrated BerkleyDB in Columba as general core service. Additionally, I’ve added a header-cache implementation which makes use of it.
Sadly there are still a couple of smaller issues/annoyances left. I therefore dropped this RoadMap item for now.
Nevertheless, I’m finished with code cleanups and optimization of loading/saving speed.
