Happy New Year and state report from the HQ #emaily #googlewave #wave

Happy New Year (well, better late than never) and Hi everyone who is interested in what's up with Emaily recently:

• As you might know, we, the developers of Emaily are Google Employees, we are doing Emaily in our 20% time. (GURU is helping us, he is not :) )
• We are back from Christmas Holidays.
• I am back from Sydney, where I met the Google Wave team, and we established a very good relationship.
• We are now testing an upcoming version of the Wave API in Emaily and because it is not released yet, we cannot share the source code from the point where started using it. This requires a big work, so please don't expect bugfixes in the meantime. Once we ported to the new API, many strange bugs will disappear at once (like phantom people on the wave which is created form an email, receiving email inconsistencies, etc.). So you probably won't see the progress, but there is!
• AppEngine is pretty limited for what we want to achieve, so we are thinking of rearchitecting Emaily into an application, which uses more of the internal Google services. For example if we run on AppEngine, we are not allowed to send and receive emails from your GMail account, just with a strangely encoded email address. We cannot use your GMail profile avatar in waves when you receive an email, etc. The consequence of that is that we once we start doing that, we probably won't continue the open-source version of Emaily. We simply don't have enough people to support the open source version. We prefer using our time to develop new features instead.
• Wave itself is very heavily under development, and we also need to rewrite our code sometimes, which leads to inefficiency in our developmet and that also make the progress slow.
• The good news is that more and more people are interested in the project inside Google, and we now have 4 developers working on the project.

Thanks for everyone who participated in the development by helping us or reporting bugs, or even testing features! We very appreciates that, and we hope that Emaily will deliver a much better user experience that it delivers today!

Cheers,

Balázs