Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Emaily short news: version 0.2.2: bugfix release; publicity, community; in the works #emaily #googlewave #wave

I'm happy to announce the new version of Emaily: 0.2.2, the new homepage, some community news, and what are in the works.

Emaily 0.2.2:

There are not too many user visible changes in this release, it is mainly about bugfixing. If you are interested about the technical details, here they are:
  • We did not store the wave-id to the wavelets, just the wavelet-id. I assumed it is unique, but it turned out that there are many wavelet ids that are the same, so we actually ended up an almost unusable database. Now in this release, we will start storing the wave-id, so each wavelet is actually unique.
  • Some cleanup happened in the email-receiving code.
  • The datastore tricked me a little: I assumed that if I set a field to null, then it won't match a given numeric query (less than a number), but I was wrong. The result of this mistake was that every time the robot checked for emails to send, it looked through the whole database. Over time, one call consumed more and more CPU, and became slower and slower. The fix was easy, and now it works well.
  • There was a bug in the robot API, which made the robot fail and forget to record the changes in its state when a blip is deleted. This was probably caused by some recent change, because earlier we did not have this problem. I made a workaround for that, so this is also working fine.
  • Added an empty robot page in http://emaily-wave.appspot.com, which redirects to the homepage (http://emaily.dlux.hu).
I hope this release will be much more stable than before.

New homepage

Well, not actually new, but the informations are updated. I hope the usage is easy enough now for most people to use it.

Publicity, community

I opened a wave for questions and feature requests. If you did not know about that yet, check the new homepage for the link. (I don't want to write the link here, because it might change in the future. The reason is that it is getting pretty slow to load: 132 blips currently). Feel free to contribute!

Arpit wrote a nice review about Emaily, you can check it here! Thank you very much!

l3reak has a step by step description of Making Google Wave work with E-mail & facebook. Very extensive description on how to use Emaily! Good work, thank you!

In the works

We are working on two major things, and I hope we can get it done soon:

Manual sending:

Emaily currently sends unedited blips after about one minute, but some people prefer pressing the "Send" button instead.

Maybe you want to write a very important email to your love, your landlord or your boss: you don't want Emaily to rush you, do you?

Threading:

Now Emaily creates a new wave from all your incoming messages, but a conversation-like user experience would be much better: We'll create a new blip instead of a new wave when a reply comes from an email user.

If you are interested in the updates about emaily, subscribe to my twitter (dluxhu) or to the "emaily" label in my blog.

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