Two days later than promised in the revised roadmap there is finally an "intermediate" release of Horde 4 for Kolab ready. With "intermediate" being the euphemistic word for "while it contains the dynamic calender that one is still pretty broken".
To install the release on a Kolab-Server-2.2.4 system the following commands should suffice:
wget http://files.pardus.de/horde4-20110224.sh sh horde4-20110224.sh
The usual warnings that went with the first Horde 4 release for Kolab apply for this release as well: Do not consider doing this on a productive server. This is just an early preview. And if you want to be able to see anything useful in the added calendar application you should ensure the user you log in with already has a calendar folder and has some data in it.
The state visible in the calendar frontend does not do the changes that happened in the backend any justice. But it can't be helped at the moment: While the Kolab backend for Horde is now largely complete the connection to the various Horde applications still need to be adapted to the changes in the backend.
Hello,
ReplyDeleteare there any screenshots of the upcoming Horde4 (non mobile-apps) available? I'm really curious about the design of the new Horde4-apps...
One thing that annoyed me with Horde in the past was the rather "antique" design of the user interface. Said that, I know, taste is mostly a point of view, but the tenor of many usersregarding the layout/design was to me, that users disliked horde because of the old-fashioned UI.
Concerning the UI taste is less a point of view but the common opinion about the Horde 3 UI. This is well known to the Horde developers as well and something we would have liked to tackle for Horde 4. It didn't work out with the release timeline we chose now. So the initial Horde 4 UI remains very similar to Horde 3. But it is marked as major topic for the next half-year release cycle (most likely 4.1 then).
ReplyDeleteIt is probably hard to convey why technical topics were more pressing for the first Horde 4 release than the "antique" UI. Especially if contenders like Roundcube attract more and more people.
But of course the view layer is just the topping and way easier to exchange than the underlying structure (see the mobile views we did in Horde 4 which were done in no time at all). In addition I believe Groupware is much more about a component architecture these days then the one big shiny monster application that looks good but lacks the interfaces to talk with the world.
Time will tell if delaying the UI topic was a decent move or not :)
Hello Gunnar,
ReplyDeletewell I hope so too (thus I would liked to get a new UI ;-).
But it seems to me that for marketing purpouses (also for non-profit opensource software!) you have to have some show-stoppers people like, rather than only doing your job beneath the surface well or even very well.
One of the best marketing examples is to me Microsoft: they implement some nice good-looking features that attract people and are fixing _afterwards_ bugs and hazzle ... but put a big foot into the market.
Hopefully the UI is overhauled very soon, the nice look-and-feel is the big advantage of Roundcube (and quite a few competitors) vs. Horde ... the UI needs urgent to be more attractive, functionality and stability was in Horde 3 from my point of view not the big problem ... but the look!
Cheers
Christoph.
Stuttgart/Germany
Hi Christoph,
ReplyDeletewe are *not* Microsoft and we don't want to be anywhere near there ;) The free software world has a lot of nice examples of software that flourishes very well even without a nice and shiny UI. Linux being a very prominent example - though I don't want to compare Horde with Linux either.
Horde is the most flexible groupware you can get and this is something not only the Horde developer team considers a very important asset. There are companies building stuff on the stack we provide.
And ask yourself what groupware is becoming these days. Certainly not a monolithic Outlook application.
But these topics are hard to debate and near to personal preference. Time will tell which choices are/were the right ones.
Cheers,
Gunnar