Hey everyone.
So, we eventually held the web UI meeting this morning, and since it was
mostly me & Alex, here's what we went through.
Scope
We agreed that the scope of the discussion was the webmail/calendaring
AJAX front end for Bongo users, plus small amounts of UI for non-Bongo
people. Hawkeye will be affected by this work, but only a little, and we
didn't really talk about it much.
Goals
There will be three main goals:
1. M4 will receive an initial version of this new system, limited to
webmail;
2. 1.0 will have web mail, calendaring and contacts management;
3. The system will be designed to accommodate further development
post 1.0.
Point 3 seems kinda obvious, but I think it's worth stating. Post Bongo
1.0, I don't think we'll necessarily go straight into Bongo 2.0: there
are likely to be further features people want which are relatively
simple developments and we'll have some kind of Bongo 1.x line. The web
stuff needs to be suitably developable.
The M4 timeframe I've said previously is two months. If we need to
stretch this slightly, that's ok with me - I don't really want to do
another release with broken Dragonfly. However, I don't want to stretch
it by much! M4 is supposed to be a usable release.
Feature List
The watchword for 1.0 is really "what we need to be usable", with a few
exceptions. We didn't go into full detail in this, but the headlines are
pretty simple:
Mail
* Conversation-based mail view similar to Gmail/Dragonfly, ability
to Reply / Reply to All / Reply to List
* composer similar to what we have now
* Be able to mark mails as Read, Flagged, Deleted, and Spam.
* Be able to tag mails and see mail tags
Plugins:
* Getting Things Done (maybe like http://www.gtdgmail.com/ ), or
other Inbox Zero tech
* Folder views
* Thread arcs
Calendar
* Week and month view of calendars
* ability to select/unselect calendars
* invite people to events
* give others access to a calendar
* (maybe) ability to link mails to calendar items
* (maybe) tasks, somehow
Contacts
* browser for entire contacts, or by addressbook
* add / edit / remove contacts
* create contact lists
Other
* dashboard-style context bar
* ability to manage self identities (contacts) and the various prefs
The main change from the theory of Dragonfly is a slightly enhanced
Contacts manager, but otherwise the feature set will be very similar.
The stuff I've marked in bullets is the 'core' bits which we couldn't
release without; plugins are further functionality I'm less worried about.
Rather than try to spec out all these features individually, the plan is
to mock-up the UI as we've already done for "Flasher" (the
calendar/event UI for non-Bongo users), e.g.:
http://www.bongo-project.org/Development/Design/Flasher/RSVP
What I want to do is spend the next couple of weeks doing a full design
for the UI, and that will be basically what gets built.
Technical Bits
We covered this in slightly less depth, but:
* the target platform is Firefox 2+, IE 7+ and recent Webkit for the
hardcore "AJAX" bits (if other browsers work, great, but it's not
release critical)
* the Dragonfly server will be bug-fixed, but re-used for 1.0.
* I'm going to write up more fully what I meant about the HTML
widgets stuff in terms of what we have now, what I want to see,
and the various good ideas people have had.
Schedule
Due to the various goals and things, the immediate schedule is
relatively clear:
* Design for web UI covering at least login and mail, initial API
discussion by 17th Feb (me, halex)
* Final agreement on feature list by end of Feb (all)
* Initial web mail UI for M4, aiming end March (me, halex, whoever
else! :)
* Schedule for remaining 1.0 development mid-end March (whoever)
Hopefully this is relatively clear :)
Cheers,
Alex.
PS. Yes, this is HTML. Get over it. :P
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