I really like the 3.0 plan. There are two extra areas in particular that i’d like to see us attack:
Firstly (the smaller of the two) i’d like to see a revamping of the Evolution client libraries, ECal & EBook, in particular ECalComponent is horrible. The work that Chris and I have been doing on libjana is showing some of the direction that such a library for accessing calendaring could go. This requires an ABI & API break to do this effectively (hence being a 3.0 thing.)
Ross has also been doing sterling work on the server side of things by migrating the eds-dbus fork into the mainline. This is now basically just waiting on the migration to git and a double review of the calendaring code.
The second and more significant thing that I care about is that I think we need to bring web services closer into the desktop. I’ve been persuaded that desktop applications are not dead but I think we need compelling, transparent and easy ways to integrate with “cloud” services. In particular we are entering an age of “almost always on” connectivity. Many people already find little use for their computers if they are not connected to the Internet. However since the omnipresent and omni-reliable 3G/wireless/wimax utopia is not yet with us we live in a world where we get connectivity in bursts as we travel, socialise and live. Our platform should cunningly pull down interesting content when the user is on cheap and reliable connectivity which they can then peruse when offline or on an expensive and unreliable connection.
A project that Ross and I have been working on at Intel to bring social networks to the desktop/mobile is called Mojito. I’ll cover this in more detail soon.
Our hero: Ross Burton