PDA

View Full Version : proposal: aquamutt


the_shrubber
03-24-2002, 12:36 PM
Okay, so i'm too busy coding other things, but maybe somebody will be inspired :-).

How about we write a mutt-like emailer using Cocoa? Maybe some sort of front-end so that we reuse as much of their code as possible?

I know i know, sorry for wanting to have my cake and eat it too, but i've got a hazy vision of something that is both as customisable as the mutt emailer (yeah threads), even respecting the muttrc as much as possible, but yet trying hard to behave like a mac application otherwise.

I want a tool that i can use just like i would mutt on a unix box, except 1) it's pretty 2) lets you click on links 3) does subtle mac things that make macs feel consistent and nice. 4) goes "ting!" (or plays whatever system sound you choose) and changes its dock icon when you receive mail

I want the niceness from the mac and unix world. I want to have this beautiful tool that respects muttrc files... in fact, i want to be able to just log in to a linux box after years of using this tool, run mutt from the command line, and NOT feel crippled... maybe missing my Binng! and dock icon (but that's what's xbiff is for).

Anyone? Anyone? I'm sure there's hard things to think about, like what bits of muttrc we'll have to ignore, but seriously, ANYONE interested?

(In other words, i WOULD be using one of those gui emailers, except they all feel fat and annoying... can we make something that's powerful yet nice, friendly yet uninstrusive?)

(-S-)

P.S... and lest we lose our focus and accomplish nothing, i say that we don't try to be all nice and generic, gui mutt. If someone wants to abstract over our code so that making a SwingMutt, WinMutt, GtkMutt, QtMutt are trivial, fine, more power to them, but we... we're making a mac application)

the_shrubber
03-24-2002, 12:51 PM
Also, just wanted to point out that a good example of what i have in mind in the carbonised vim project: http://www.vim.org/macs.html (more specifically: http://homepage.mac.com/fisherbb/index.html)

works beautifully (except for not displaying the right font encoding)... so why not mutt too, eh?

Now who's itching and got the free time?

seraphim
01-01-2003, 09:13 AM
I love this idea. I wish I knew how to program the Mac, just so I could do this.

Do you think it could be done in RealBasic? Maybe sometime in the next year...


Regards,
-Seraphim

the_shrubber
01-01-2003, 09:46 AM
I wouldn't see why not. Don't know much about RealBasic myself except for a few glances. My thinking is that it would be good to use as much of the mutt src as possible, so that would mean finding a way to hook up C code and RealBasic code. I suspect it'd be easier to straight out use Cocoa and Objective C, i don't know them either.

seraphim
01-01-2003, 11:36 PM
I haven't programmed in C in more than ten years... Haven't done any "real" programming at all since then, except lots of Perl scripts.

But AquaMutt sure would be nice, wouldn't it? :)


Regards,
-Seraphim