What’s next on the agenda?

alistair234 · 15 Nov 2006, 08:47 PM

hi all, now that the domain split has happened and Replicated severs etc I’m curious to know what’s next on the agenda to happen?

greenplum · 15 Nov 2006, 11:16 PM

I know in the grand scheme it may sound dull and lacking excitement but a calendar/diary with reminders within FM would be personally appreciated

Chipper · 15 Nov 2006, 11:27 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by greenplum
I know in the grand scheme it may sound dull and lacking excitement but a diary with reminders within FM would be personally appreciated

Agreed. If I had the time, I would devise a calendar/reminder mock up like what neilj did with the address book.

hadaso · 16 Nov 2006, 06:27 AM

I think the next thing on the agenda is finishing full support for Unicode (not because people really need to be able to compose email in multiple alphabets but because it's a major infrastructure project that will mean FastMail would only have to support one encoding in the interface).

Then there's the Family/small business accounts that's been planned and depended on the domain split being complete. So now it's complete, and my kids are approaching email using age...

robmueller · 17 Nov 2006, 11:55 AM

No particular order, but things being thought about/worked on:

Family + small business packages

Unicode support (if only again to clean up the internal mess that the current multi-charset support creates)

Interface improvements and cleanups

Better spam scanning (bayes, image OCR, etc)

Better help and support system.

Mostly core email stuff at the moment.

Of course, sometimes side projects come along that take a life of their own. The file storage + photo gallery projects were like that. There's nothing quite like Bron/Richard/Myself wanting a particular feature to motivate oneself to get it done

Rob

brong · 17 Nov 2006, 12:18 PM

Personally I'd love to get back to the filestorage system and put some finishing touches on it - in particular make it possible to share filestorage between accounts.

Long-running tasks - I want to separate them out so that you can keep going and they tick away in the background giving you a status update at the top of the screen each time you do something. When they're finished, you have a file to download or just a "it completed" message (possibly even just an email in your inbox).

Also - archived messages are a zip file - it would be great for such things to appear as a virtual path in your filestorage so you can download them via FTP or DAV instead of the web.

On that topic - making our websites safe for evil download tools that make multiple "range" requests for the same file, and making that not murder your bandwidth expenses.

I want to rewrite the WAP interface in Perl and bring it into the main infrastructure so it has database access and can use the address book.

They are probably the most user visible things on my list - other things are all core infrastructure stuff, pretty boring. More tweaking the backups so that load on the backup server doesn't shoot up to insane levels when it tries to stream 40 different users at once to just a few disks - balancing that out will help keep load down on the IMAP servers while backups are running as well (mainly of interest to non-US users whos awake times overlap our backup period)

hadaso · 17 Nov 2006, 04:17 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by brong
Long-running tasks - I want to separate them out so that you can keep going and they tick away in the background giving you a status update at the top of the screen each time you do something. When they're finished, you have a file to download or just a "it completed" message (possibly even just an email in your inbox).

There's a FireFox bug that brings up a warning dialog if a scripts runs too much time. When uploading big files (several hundred KB) in the web interface these come up again and again. It's pretty annoying, and Mozilla currently has no real solution coming (from what I read in their site they just acknowledge that it is not easy to fix because of the way the software was initially designed). So we cannot expect to do away with the FireFox bug (except not using FireFox...), but perhaps FastMail can somehow avoid this. You would certainly want to avoid this in screens that have tasks running "in the background".

savirr · 17 Nov 2006, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by robmueller
No particular order, but things being thought about/worked on:

Can I put in a request for a way to completely download the contents of the address book, perhaps as an XML file? This has been discussed in the Feature Requests forum so I won't repeat myself here...

Simon

ewal · 17 Nov 2006, 08:46 PM

What happened to the calendar idea?

In this 2004 article Jeremy mentioned that a calendar function was to be launched soon.

I assume therefore that quite a lot of coding for the calendar had already taken place then. Perhaps the remaining coding can place and we can then test (play with

) this new calendar function.

Ed

JRobert · 17 Nov 2006, 09:24 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by hadaso
There's a FireFox bug that brings up a warning dialog if a scripts runs too much time.

Hadaso: Does this config option address that issue for you?

hadaso · 17 Nov 2006, 09:49 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by JRobert
Hadaso: Does this config option address that issue for you?

I knew about this config option. I never changed it. I now saw mine was set to 10 seconds (perhaps some FF update raised it from 5) and manually set it to 20, but still there are uploads taking much more than 20 seconds, and the reason that this "dom.max_script_run_time" exists is to avoid indefinite interface lockups. So locking the interface for 20 seconds instead of 5 is not a really good compromise, I think. Sometime in the past, I think somewhere in the FF bug tracker I read about this and they really said that this mechanism was a bad design choice and trhey're sort of stuck with it (and that IE has a better solution of the particular issue). Anyway, it seems they (Mozilla) are stuck with this bug until they do a big change, and then the best solution would be if the web interface could somehow avoid it.

greenplum · 17 Nov 2006, 10:52 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by ewal
What happened to the calender idea?

Ed

Ditto

Edward Velo · 17 Nov 2006, 10:58 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by robmueller
No particular order, but things being thought about/worked on:

Would it be possible to update the http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/comingenhancements.htm page?

This page should reflect the above. As it is now, the last recently completed item was done in september 2005 :-)

Thanks

NJSS · 17 Nov 2006, 11:08 PM

When updating:-

http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/comingenhancements.htm

Please add the calendar referred to by Jeremy back in 2004, as it appears to have been quietly dropped from the list of coming enhancements in the interim ! ?

fhapgood · 18 Nov 2006, 12:07 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by brong
Personally I'd love to get back to the filestorage system and put some finishing touches on it - in particular make it possible to share filestorage between accounts.

Spot on. I'd especially like to see better integration between file storage and email -- like being able to tuck an attachment connected to a piece of email into the files structure directory structure with a keystroke or two, and the reverse: attaching
an item in file storage to a piece of email, etc.

Please tell me if either or both of these are possible right now. If so, I've overlooked them.

15 Nov 2006, 08:47 PM	#1
alistair234 Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: Greenock in Scotland, UK Posts: 182	What’s next on the agenda? hi all, now that the domain split has happened and Replicated severs etc I’m curious to know what’s next on the agenda to happen?

15 Nov 2006, 11:16 PM	#2
greenplum Essential Contributor Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: N.E. England Posts: 423	I know in the grand scheme it may sound dull and lacking excitement but a calendar/diary with reminders within FM would be personally appreciated Last edited by greenplum : 18 Nov 2006 at 01:05 AM.

17 Nov 2006, 08:46 PM	#9
ewal Master of the @ Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: West Sussex, UK Posts: 1,334	What happened to the calendar idea? In this 2004 article Jeremy mentioned that a calendar function was to be launched soon. I assume therefore that quite a lot of coding for the calendar had already taken place then. Perhaps the remaining coding can place and we can then test (play with ) this new calendar function. Ed Last edited by ewal : 17 Nov 2006 at 11:26 PM.

16 Nov 2006, 06:27 AM	#4
hadaso The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Holon, Israel. Posts: 4,856	I think the next thing on the agenda is finishing full support for Unicode (not because people really need to be able to compose email in multiple alphabets but because it's a major infrastructure project that will mean FastMail would only have to support one encoding in the interface). Then there's the Family/small business accounts that's been planned and depended on the domain split being complete. So now it's complete, and my kids are approaching email using age...

17 Nov 2006, 11:55 AM	#5
robmueller Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 6,102 Representative of: Fastmail.FM	No particular order, but things being thought about/worked on: Family + small business packages Unicode support (if only again to clean up the internal mess that the current multi-charset support creates) Interface improvements and cleanups Better spam scanning (bayes, image OCR, etc) Better help and support system. Mostly core email stuff at the moment. Of course, sometimes side projects come along that take a life of their own. The file storage + photo gallery projects were like that. There's nothing quite like Bron/Richard/Myself wanting a particular feature to motivate oneself to get it done Rob

17 Nov 2006, 12:18 PM	#6
brong The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 2,696 Representative of: Fastmail.fm	Personally I'd love to get back to the filestorage system and put some finishing touches on it - in particular make it possible to share filestorage between accounts. Long-running tasks - I want to separate them out so that you can keep going and they tick away in the background giving you a status update at the top of the screen each time you do something. When they're finished, you have a file to download or just a "it completed" message (possibly even just an email in your inbox). Also - archived messages are a zip file - it would be great for such things to appear as a virtual path in your filestorage so you can download them via FTP or DAV instead of the web. On that topic - making our websites safe for evil download tools that make multiple "range" requests for the same file, and making that not murder your bandwidth expenses. I want to rewrite the WAP interface in Perl and bring it into the main infrastructure so it has database access and can use the address book. They are probably the most user visible things on my list - other things are all core infrastructure stuff, pretty boring. More tweaking the backups so that load on the backup server doesn't shoot up to insane levels when it tries to stream 40 different users at once to just a few disks - balancing that out will help keep load down on the IMAP servers while backups are running as well (mainly of interest to non-US users whos awake times overlap our backup period)

17 Nov 2006, 11:08 PM	#14
NJSS Master of the @ Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Hampshire, UK Posts: 1,238	When updating:- http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/comingenhancements.htm Please add the calendar referred to by Jeremy back in 2004, as it appears to have been quietly dropped from the list of coming enhancements in the interim ! ?