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Spotlight on Beam -- Interview with Oliver Tappe. While surfing the web one day we came upon the Beam app (BEware Another Mailer), originally talked about by Oliver Thylmann over at BeNews. It looks like a fine start to a mid-entry mailer rich with just enough subtle features to keep it used on a daily basis, but become essential to the those used to the mailing habits along the lines of PostMaster or Mail-It. |
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T.B.J. Thanks for allowing The BeOSJournal some time to speak with you. We know you'd rather be hard at work on adding new features to your app. ;) |
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Oliver Glad to be here. |
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T.B.J. Did you base the app on any particular model/reference? |
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Oliver Well, in a way Beam owes a lot to Postmaster, since I was using that a lot before I got fed up with it and started Beam, but the basic ideas of Postmaster were right, like good BeOS integration and the like. |
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T.B.J. What prompted you to make it open source? |
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Oliver The fact that I appreciate the open-source idea and that I think that this is the only way one can ensure that people can shape Beam the way they want it to be |
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T.B.J. How long have you been programming, either for BeOS, or in general. Feel free to elaborate if you don't mind. |
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Oliver Well, I am a computer kid, really, started at the age of 12 with a C64, grew up with an Amiga and finally took heart and bought a PC and a BeBox later... I have been a freelance programmer for 12 years now, and I still had no public open source project going...>:o) |
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T.B.J. When did Beam first begin it's life as an app? How long after that process was started that you yourself started using it? |
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Oliver Beam was started in Aug 2000, since my internet-provider updated their SMTP-Server to require authentication, which none of the existing email-clients could provide. I think it took 8 months before Beam was at least half usable. The main problem for me was that I had very little BeOS programming experience at the time I started Beam. I had to get used to liblayout, find a way to live in threaded peace and read all those RFC's. |
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T.B.J. Wow, and all that coding was done by yourself, alone? |
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Oliver Yep, all the code is mine, except for the libraries Beam uses (Santa's Giftbag, libregexx). |
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T.B.J. For the record, can you explain the relevance of RFC, and why threading is so important to Beam? Not all of our readers are code monkeys... ;) |
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Oliver Well, the RFCs (Request For Comments), are an internet standard and really important reading when you are programming any app that actually sends data over the net... In the RFCs the exact DOs and DONTs of email-message-formats, MIME and different transport protocols are written out. Since I wanted Beam to be a decent emailer that doesn't crack up when encountering a badly formatted mail (emails which are quite common, it seems), I had to dig deep into those RFCs. Threading on the other hand is the way to separate distinct tasks within any application if you want to avoid an inresponsive GUI... |
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T.B.J. How comfortable are you now coding in BeOS? |
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Oliver It depends on the topic really. by now, I know my ways around the Interface, Application and Support Kits, but I know basically nothing about the MediaKit or some other, mode advanced stuff. I actually like coding under BeOS a lot, since I really appreciate having a decent C++ API. |
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T.B.J. When is the next update to Beam expected? |
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Oliver Version 0.91 is due today or tomorrow. |
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T.B.J. What improvements will it bring? |
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Oliver A lot >;o) Beam now has signature support (static and scripted), all menu shortcuts can be freely configured, the quoting-formatting problem is now solved in a way that I think is quite usable (no more combing effects when replying to mails with long lines),... Beam 0.91 does not seem to crash anymore, and it should work under Dano and Bone. The Preferences have been improved in general (even more options) and Beam can set itself up as preferred app for email. There is also a Deskbar icon. That's all I can think of, at the moment. |
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T.B.J. A lot of application coders these days are discussing themes, skins and an inordinate amount of user customization with the interface. What are your thoughts on these concepts? |
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Oliver Concerning skins, I must admit that I do not believe skinning is such a great idea overall, because of the usability problems it usually causes, I mean, I think skinning your usual mp3-player is alright, because it only has a relatively small amount of controls, but when you talk about larger applications, trying to implant skin-support makes the app grow a lot in size. Just take a look at mozilla (which looks cool, though!). Since I would like Beam to be relatively small and start swiftly, I think I will only allow font-changes, maybe color-changes, but no button-graphics and the like. |
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T.B.J. Talk to us about Filters. |
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Oliver Ok, filters will be the very next thing that's coming (Beam 0.92). I currently plan to base Beam's filtering on the standard mail-filtering language SIEVE (RFC 3028) which is pretty capable, so Beam will be able to filter mails against single or all header-fields, the mail-text or even some artificial criteria (e.g. mail is not addressed to any of my mail-accounts, thus probably being spam). Available actions will be MoveToFolder, TagMail, Delete and StartExternalProgram, perhaps more. There will be a GUI for the mail-filter creation, of course (this is probably the most difficult part to get right). |
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T.B.J. What about auto-replying? |
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Oliver I am not too sure about that, since auto-replying often leads to serious trouble (people stuffing mailing-lists for a duration of two weeks). |
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T.B.J. Well, this certainly covered a fair bit of material. I expect by now, people will be eagerly downloading Beam to try it out. Let's not keep them waiting. Thank you Oliver for your time and discussion on what is turning out to be a fine application! |
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Oliver The pleasure is all mine. Thank you for having me here. |
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Download Beam at the BeBits page, and visit Oliver's homepage with suggestions and comments. |
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