Today I was browsing the Evolution FAQ just to see what it’s like and whether there are any cool Evo tricks I don’t know about. There are, and I also found out about the existence of a remove-duplicates-plugin!

The plugin builds nicely on Ubuntu Gutsy, and after restarting Evolution you can go and enable the plugin. Then simply select all messages in a folder and find a new “Remove duplicates” entry in the context menu.

The easier of these is using fuse and obexfs. I initially found this tip on Google Groups, and later David’s more thorough HOWTO. Here’s the drill:

• Find out your phone’s Bluetooth MAC address if you don’t know it already:
  hcitool scan
• Find out the OBEX FTP channel it uses
  sdptool search FTP
• Load the fuse kernel module:
  sudo modprobe fuse
• Make a suitable mount point for your phone:
  mkdir ~/Phone
• Mount
  obexfs -bXX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX -BYY ~/Phone
  (where XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is your phone’s MAC and YY is the OBEX channel)
• Unmount when you’re done with your file transfers:
  fusermount -u ~/Phone

That’s it!

Image: Browsing my phone via Bluetooth,
WebDAV and a Web browser

The other method is more exciting and far more geeky. It doesn’t actually involve mounting your phone’s filesystem at all, but making its contents available by running a web server on it. I’ve known about Nokia’s mobile Web server for some time already, but was inspired to try it out recently by Mikko‘s comment on a blog entry of mine involving phone/linux synchronizing.

You can selectively make all your phone’s information available on the Web for yourself, for a group of friends, or globally. Register on mymobilesite.net, download the Mobile Server software, and away you go. It works very well, but eats far too much RAM to be running permanently at this stage (it’s advertised as beta). For temporary access it’s a viable solution though, and here’s the strong point: no setup is needed on the receiving side, all you need is a computer and a Web browser! I will certainly keep an eye on the server’s development and play with it more in the weeks and months to come.

There are two main routes to solve the sync problem: the Web2.0 Way and the Old School Way. Both have one thing in common: if you’re a Linux user, you should keep your data online. Forget about plugging your Nokia smartphone via the USB cable and pressing “Sync”. While software such as OpenSync and Gnokii exist, I’ve never had complete success with them. Also, when your data lives on a centralized server maintained by professional Other People, you get backups as a bonus!

There are three main things that I need to be able to access at all times: email, calendar, and todo list. I’ll describe my sync methods below.

The Web2.0 Way

The hip and the cool among us enjoy Gmail and other online apps and services, and I do like them as well. For example, Gmail’s user interface changed the way I looked at webmail forever, and in some ways it’s superior to any desktop email client. Who has better search than Google, after all? When you have a mail archive of hundreds of megabytes, it’s safe to say that the network is no longer the slowest part of your system when you search for that message from Charlotte she wrote in 2004, saying she doesn’t love you anymore. We’re generating increasingly large amounts of information, and as Paul Boutin noted a while back, you would never allow a system in your house that would compete with Google’s search.

Sync-wise, the Web2.0 Way has one obvious advantage over the Old School Way: there simply isn’t very much to synchronize! Gmail has an awesome interface for your desktop browser, as well as for the puny WAP browser on your mobile phone, so that’s a no-brainer. Even better, Google’s Java mobile client application is top notch.

Google Calendar is a very nice web app as is, and it has a more-or-less adequate mobile version as well. Google doesn’t give you a todo list of any kind though, so I recommend Remember The Milk. RTM has all the features you can hope for and then some, and comes with a very nice mobile version for your WAP browser.

On the desktop, you can integrate all these apps into your GNOME environment with read-only access. GCal and RTM provide standard iCal interfaces you can subscribe to with Evolution. This allows you to view your appointments and tasks right from GNOME’s Clock applet. You can also make a smart bookmark for Epiphany to search Gmail, and have it accessible from the deskbar applet if you like: 1) Go to your Gmail inbox. 2) Switch to “basic HTML” mode. 3) Search Gmail for a recognizable string like FOOBAR. 4) Bookmark the results page. 5) Edit the bookmark, replacing FOOBAR in the URL with %s and give it a descriptive name such as “Gmail search”. You will now be able to search your Gmail archives from the Epiphany location bar and deskbar-applet. (Firefox version is left as an exercise to FF users.)

Old School Way

In a nice paradox, the good old fashioned computing lifestyle demands much more from your tools than the “more advanced” Web2.0. However, if you have such tools, they are usually more comfortable and flexible to use than web apps. They will also survive network outages, which naturally is a tremendous benefit. My gear is Evolution on the desktop and the native Messaging and Calendar applications on my Nokia E70. The phone has to support the SyncML synchronization standard (sometimes called OMA these days) and IMAP for mail.

On the server side, we need an IMAP account, which rules out every free email provider I know of, including Gmail. We also need a SyncML server. ScheduleWorld offers this one for free, so we’re in luck. Evolution does not speak SyncML, but we can use a simple command-line tool called SyncEvolution as glue.

The benefits of IMAP are obvious: multiple clients can connect, even at the same time, and all mail is accessible to all of them. One can argue we can achieve the same with Gmail, but synchronizing local folders is far from trivial using POP.¹ Also, since mobile phones usually don’t have lots of storage (mine can handle 2GB at best,) it is nice to work with only the mail headers and download and delete message bodies as needed.

SyncEvolution doesn’t come with Ubuntu, and I haven’t seen any suitable Debian packages floating around the Internet. Not to worry, the source builds nicely on Ubuntu, and you’ll be up and running soon enough. There is a nice tutorial on the Ubuntu Forums as well. I’ve setup a bash alias syncevo=’syncevolution scheduleworld’ and run that whenever needed. Works like a charm.

Which Path should i take, Master?

Whichever you like more! I’ve been using and loving both, and the best thing is they don’t rule each other out. ScheduleWorld not only syncs your phone and Evolution but Google Calendar as well, and recently introduced experimental support for syncing Gmail contacts. It also has quite a usable web interface too. Mail can be duplicated between your IMAP server and Gmail via simple forwarding.

Ultimately, the more advanced your mobile phone, the more you will like old-fashioned “native apps and sync” approach, while the Web2.0 applications’ mobile versions will work in your old phone’s WAP browser, and even have SMS interfaces.

1. But see the “recent hack”, which is useful for other things as well: I use it to backup my Gmail with fetchmail.

The IMified buddy adding an important task to my RTM list

Well, turns out that now someone has! I found about IMified, an instant message buddy that will connect you to Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, Blogger and a number of other services, plus offers a simple notes list, todos, and reminders on its own too. I’ve played with it a little, and it works rather well after the initial unstability (the service was launched just four days ago.) You can add the buddy to most of the popular IM services but we Ubuntu users of course only use Jabber since we like our freedom :)

The interface is nice, and works great on my mobile phone too since IMified doesn’t hit my screen with too much verbosity. Yet it always providies clear instructions, I haven’t been lost once. Google Calendar has some timezone problems, and the Remember the Milk functionality could be more advanced (and no, you don’t get mail notifications), but IMified certainly has my support – I won’t be studying XMPP on my own any time soon :)

Done!

The best part of ToPaZ, however, is the very fact that it doesn’t exist. So, we are all allowed to dream up our own vision of what it would be like. In my own opinion, ToPaZ means first and foremost a non-interface that is as invisible as possible, leaving only the user and her data into the desktop computing equation. I have been experimenting with existing GNOME technology to achieve a task-oriented environment where I can ignore the interface as much possible.

So here goes. Presenting the topyli Non-Interface, where people, documents and events are first class objects. Ideally, you should never start an application on the topyli desktop, but simply work on tasks, contact people, and find information.

Here’s what you should see when you login to the topyli desktop in the morning:

In other words, not very much. A transparent panel at the top of the screen, with a few objects. It is important to place the panel to the top instead of the bottom of the screen. We still won’t be able to get rid of windows and applications, and those will have their controls at the top. Therefore, it makes no sense to make your mouse travel all the way to the bottom of the screen to work with panel objects.

According to Fitt’s Law, the corners of the screen are the most important spots of the whole desktop, because they are the easiest to hit with your mouse. The current GNOME default layout takes this into account and tries to use the four corners as efficiently as possible, and Ubuntu does even better, moving the trashcan from a desktop icon (where it would be covered by windows most of the time anyway) to an applet in one of Fitt’s corners.

The topyli desktop only has two widgets for interacting with the system, so I only use two corners, saving valuable screen space. At the left Fitt’s corner lives the Deskbar Applet, my primary “interface”. This is where you enter commands for the machine to act on. Next to it is Tomboy, a brilliant, Wiki-like personal note taking application. At the right corner sits the window selector applet, which lists all your open windows, including minimized ones. Next to it is the notification area, where applications will notify you of events that need your attention. In my case, it permanently houses the XChat systray and Gmail notification icons, which tell me about new IRC and email messages.

Notably, the window list (or “taskbar” to Windows users) is gone, as well as the workspace switching applet. I can switch windows with the window selector on the right or by typing a window’s title (say, a document title in a word processor’s titlebar) into the deskbar applet. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+UpArrow brings up the workspace selector to the middle of the screen. The calendar applet in the middle is big enough to hit quite reliably even if it’s not in the corner.

Naturally, the action of focusing the deskbar applet is bound to a key, so you don’t actually have to use the mouse to reach your primary interactive device. I recommend the Menu key between the right-hand side AltGr and Ctrl button, or the Windows logo button on the left if you have those.

One thing I definitely don’t want is persistent icons on the desktop, where they would be inaccessibly buried under windows most of the time. The deskbar is smart enough to find the folders in the root of my home directory, because I keep a rather flat hierarchy, like so:

Of course, I use the Nautilus file manager in spatial mode by default, so that all my folders open at the same place and size where I last left them. Sometimes an old-fashioned file browser is still in order, but that’s no problem since we can order one from the deskbar:

Of course, I almost never want to browse my files. I want people, documents, and events, right? Well, the previous screenshot should show some promise of that, with the deskbar in all its glory. It reads what i’m typing at real time, and will happily

• search all my files for whatever I type in. Not just filenames (who remembers those anyway?) but their entire contents, which are constantly indexed by the Beagle daemon,
• browse all the installed applications (and their descriptions) for matching ones and offer to start them,
• go online to search the mail in my Gmail account and search for matches (thanks Stuart’s Gmail plugin),
• find names and addresses in my address book,
• see if any events in my calendar match what i’m typing,
• see if any open windows have titles similar to the typed string,
• offer to find the definition of my search string in the dictionary,
• see if anything in my Epiphany web browser bookmarks, or browsing history rings a bell. Epiphany works much better than Firefox here!
• if i enter a calculation, perform it (with Spooky’s calculator plugin)
• do drastic system stuff such as logout, reboot or shutdown the machine
• and of course offer to search google, and my vast collection of online bookmarks on Diigo, by tag or full text search

Keeping an address book, mailbox and calendar locally on my machine would be rather silly. The Deskbar can search my Gmail account, and Gmail is accessible from any machine or handheld device. The Evolution Data Server can fetch information from online sources, so I keep my calendar and address book on Scheduleworld‘s servers, and subscribe e-d-s to their iCal and LDAP services. Scheduleworld supports SyncML, which means my Nokia E70 phone always has the same information as my desktop:

And while we’re at it, why not integrate everything with the Google personalized home page itself as well since Scheduleworld supports it :)

All in all, while not ToPaZ, I find my topyli desktop experment rather successful. Using no non-existing future technology (which is very difficult to come by anyway), I think I’ve greatly simplified the typical workflow, compared to anything I’ve used before:

1. Press the Menu button, tell the Deskbar what you’re thinking about
2. Do your stuff

Any suggestions for improving the system are welcome of course!