Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Calendar, please.

Definitely on the list - but you've all been hearing that for quite a long time.

If I've learned nothing else from the past few years, I have at least learned that making predictions on when the calendar code might actually see the light of day is futile, so I won't fall into that trap here. What I will tell you is that some of the code is written, the outline is quite thoroughly planned, and the priority is very, very high. The internal object interface I've been ponderously working my way through recently (see my development blogs for more on this) is the final crucial component in the calendar puzzle, and that is now working.

I know how frustrating it must be to wait and wait for a promised feature - I feel it more keenly than you can imagine. All I can tell you is that I'm sorry for making you all wait so long, but that it WILL happen. Once we get a bit closer to full speed development, I will be starting a thread in one of the forums here and inviting comments, suggestions and thoughts, just in case there are things I've missed.

Cheers!

-- David --

Since you're reworking the address book, I want to state that Pegasus needs to be able to synch with a cell-phone/PDA preferrably with MS-Activesynch. As a frequent road rat, Calendar and address book is what makes life possible, and having the exact same data on both computers, on-line web services, and the mail-software is a must for 2008 and forward. The next thing I use heavily is Notes on the PDA, and lastly email messaging over IMAP. So in the following order:

1. Address book, the same in Pegasus as in a PDA
2. Calendar, as above
3. Notes
4. E-Mail

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Kind regards / Peter

Hi !

Well, sure a calendar is something useful, but the idea of Pegasus Mail was only to deal with email and do it the best possible way (which is the case). Now, I am a bit afraid that this calendar integration will open the road to make Pegasus Mail like other programs by combining in it more and more features that are not closely related to emails managing. In this respect, calendar has little to do with emails, and I think the energy and time dedicated to code these not-so-close-to-emails-features would be better use in improving Pegasus Mail on the emails managing department. That said, a friend of mine recommended me the following calendar : http://www.essentialpim.com/ . He uses the free version, which is sufficient for one person, but lots of features in the paid version are really nice. So maybe you can go and have a look, and even try the free version for a little bit of time, and take this program as an inspiration (especially the fetaures in the not-free version).

 

Bye !

Ginhead. 

Peter Strömblad:

Since you're reworking the address book, I want to state that Pegasus needs to be able to synch with a cell-phone/PDA preferrably with MS-Activesynch. As a frequent road rat, Calendar and address book is what makes life possible, and having the exact same data on both computers, on-line web services, and the mail-software is a must for 2008 and forward. The next thing I use heavily is Notes on the PDA, and lastly email messaging over IMAP. So in the following order:

1. Address book, the same in Pegasus as in a PDA
2. Calendar, as above
3. Notes
4. E-Mail

I definitively agree: the calendar and address book must be "moveable": I need to have the same address book on myYahoo and Gmail webmails as on my computer and I must be able to synchronise calendar.

There are these online services, of course, but as Peter says there are also mobile devices (telephone, PDA and most importantly in the business world, Blackberry) as well as other computing platform: my edsktop is Windos but my laptop runs Linux (Mandriva). I must be able to transfer my contacts and calendar to almost any other application.

Maybe David can provide us with a "standard" format (I don't know if there are any RFCs but there are formats of calendars such as iCal or CSV that can ne handled vy many applications) with a couple of preset pipelines to popular formats / applications and then ask the community to develop whichever additional plugin we would see fit.

One last sync: this must work both ways: import as well as export!

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--
Laurent

Ginhead:

Hi !

Well, sure a calendar is something useful, but the idea of Pegasus Mail was only to deal with email and do it the best possible way (which is the case). Now, I am a bit afraid that this calendar integration will open the road to make Pegasus Mail like other programs by combining in it more and more features that are not closely related to emails managing. In this respect, calendar has little to do with emails, and I think the energy and time dedicated to code these not-so-close-to-emails-features would be better use in improving Pegasus Mail on the emails managing department. That said, a friend of mine recommended me the following calendar : http://www.essentialpim.com/ . He uses the free version, which is sufficient for one person, but lots of features in the paid version are really nice. So maybe you can go and have a look, and even try the free version for a little bit of time, and take this program as an inspiration (especially the fetaures in the not-free version).

 

Bye !

Ginhead. 

I tried essentialpim but it doesn't make it for. Plus, it as far as I remember, it doesn't know about Pegasus, it doesn't know about my emails. I need a calendar that talks to my address book, an addressbook that has a view on my emails.
I need to be able to set up appointments straight from an email, to, drag message on a date, to follow the history of email exchange with a particular contact on my calendar: I'm not so good at looking at leasts, I prefer to have a more graphic view.

I knwo that what David intends to design is very close to what I've been looking for. I haven't found that anywhere else.

Oh, and as long as I am on a Windows platform I need Pegasus as my mail client and I would only consider third party apps that speak fluent pmailian!

On the other hand I agree that there'e no need to bloat the software. But adding 21st century business-like capabilities to the software is not bloat.

Cheers!

---

--
Laurent

Hi !

Ah, ok, I understand now in which way this calendar feature can be useful. Concerning the bloat risk, I am rather confident that Pegasus Mail will not get bloated for it seems to me that David is not really bloated-software friendly. Now about Essential PIM, I think one should give it a try for it seems to have really nice capabilities, but when I say "Should give it a try", that means with the objective of coding a calendar to integrate into Pegasus Mail, so the objective is to test Essential PIM and retain only its best features and then take them as an inspiration for the Pegasus Mail Calendar. Also, on a professional basis, one of the reasons Outlook is the first choices of companies is because of these calendar functions, and our friends from the Mozilla Foundation are trying to eat market shares by developing "Lightning". I think we should also aim in the same direction, and maybe, who knows, one day 95% of the companies will use Pegasus Mail with annually donations to ensure development. Also, if the Python scripting module could be integrated, that would give us the most powerful email client out there, and I am sure that many companies and non-professional users will definitely adopt it for a very very long time :-).

Cheers !

Ginhead. 

A calendar would be nice, of course, but I am very concerned that the introduction of such a gigantic new feature would suck resources away from the core functionality of e-mail and a solid addressbook.

I have always felt that Calendar functionality was peripheral to email communication and a contacts database.  Sure, some people in large corporations might "accept meetings" via e-mail, and an integrated calendar would be useful in this case.  But I seriously question how many Pegasus users need this functionality.

There are a lot of really nice stand-alone calendars available as stand-alone apps (Essential PIM as someone else mentioned, for example).  Is it really necessary to re-invent the wheel?

In any case...If calendar functionality is "very, very high" priority as David responded , then I hope that address book is "very, very, very, very high" priority!!

I don't see the absolute necessity of a calendar either. Mine is online, like many people now I believe. I believe i18n spellchecking is way more of a priority.

I would very much prefer work on the address book. Especially sync with my Nokia cell phone, so I don't have to write on the tiny phone keyboard, and I can import everything in a single file. Bluetooth and so on...
 

I just want to confirm that PIM functions (mainly calendar and contacts) and possible synchronisations with mobile devices would be the highest on my personal wish list.

A great deal of business life organises itself with email being a centre piece of communication strongly linked to addresses and calenders. It becomes increasingly important also in my day to day work, and honestly I assume for many other professional users as well. If this can be solved I believe that there would be greater chance to get Pegasus Mail also into larger firms which might be looking for alternatives to the costly mainstream applications. As someone already has suggested elsewhere, this could hopefully also lead to some additional development funding support from that side.

The missing of a good PIM function(/application) which would cooperate with Pegasus Mail becomes an increasing obstacle for me as I need to organise especially my calender and contacts and even synchronise them with my PDA (e.g. Palm Treo750w Windows Mobile) etc. As a very unsatisfying compromise I am currently using the Outlook PIM functions (calendar and contacts) and PM for my emails.

David has already indicated his in principle positive stand towards a PIM inclusion, if I understood his message correctly. Maybe its time to draw out a possible roadmap on the PIM development/incorporation and put figures to it and then see whether the community is willing to support it with some additional seed funding?

Cheers

Thomas

I can see the for and the against, I personally wouldn't use it in my email app, but I mainly calendar features in the database system I built to deal with. My suggestion would be a switch... turn on or off and it only loads when needed. and when it unloads it ensure it frees the memory

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I can spell, I just can't type

I would use it

I'm no big fan of Outlook, but the calendar functionality with invitations etc. is a good feature.

To have a switch where you can turn it on or off, is in my opinion not necessary, but should be

no problem to implement.

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kind regards

Personnally I wouldn't use a calendar that is not online for my colleagues to see, comment, etc

 

I would perhaps use a calendar in Pegasus if it was synchronized by Webdav or something, but then it would be a lot of work compared to directly accessing the calendar online with present time dsl connections.

I know, David, I get a little wordy at times but cannot let this get by without a comment from ole Windy.

#1. Pegasus Mail is very light weight and undoubtably the most powerful, more features than any of the others, and can even be used by this DUMMY after a few years of learning.  Would not want anythingy to be added that would change or disrupt any of the presently featured operations, except maybe some improvements which I cannot find any.

 #2. Why put a calendar in Pegasus Mail when that should be made a add-on for those that would like to have it and those that do not will just not download that feature.  If it adds some extra bloat then those of us that do not want it do not HAVE to download and install.

#3. David has done so much work to give us this FEATURE RICH program that is usable, even by ME, would not like making him change it to such an extreme that some of us would need to change.  I VOTE for the calendar, but; as an add-on feature for those that want it.

#4. THE END of my input on this topic.

Thank you for reading my message,

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TIA, CU L8R,
NTxLS
Dell Inspiron AMD Athlon(tm) 64bit Dual Core Processor 2.3GHz, RAM 3G; 32bit Vista build 6001 SP1; IE v7.0; FF v3.0.4/wXtensions PM v1.7.2, NoScript v1.8.5; CFP v3.5.55810.432, AntiVir v8.0xxx

When I suggested to have a PIM function (mainly calendar and contacts etc.) included, I thought of having this functionality useable from within or with PM which in my view does not necessarily mean to be hard-coded into Pegasus Mail. An extension or plugin which could be installed or not would just be as fine as long as both applications would work nicely with each other (e.g. drag and drop messages into calendar to create entry, meeting etc.). In a very early message to the PM team - 29 April 2004 - I already mentioned an calendar and suggested to maybe link up with other existing PIM applications such as Mozilla Calendar. This was just an example and I do not even know whether this particular example would actually make any sense (programming wise). Of course there would be many other issues involved as well, such as licence, etc.

But I fully agree with NTxLS - I love the functionality and flexibility PM provides and which in that form is not found elsewhere!

Cheers

Thomas