|
|
        |
What makes Nirvana tick?Ahh, the geeks of this world. Those of us to whom raw horsepower and really cool features is all that matters. 'Manual? I don't need a manual!' we chant as we press onward in our quest for ever more complicated, ever more hackable, ever more powerful applications to stick on our penguin box. (onward Linux!) In view of this world (of which I am a proud member), I've listed all the geeky, hackable, raw byte-code features I could dig up, in an effort to assist you in your constant quest for the latest and greatest. Nirvana is open-source. Right down to it's core. (I just had to bring it up). You can enter the CVS repository (:extssh:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net/cvsroot/nirvana) and download the source for the whole project. On top of that, most of the libraries used in the project are open source as well. Put that together, and you can slice, hack, and steal as much of the code as you want. All under the golden protection of our wonderful license. One thing I ask though, if you do make changes for the better (which, knowing your side of life, you probably will) I'd like to see them first hand (I'm of your mental persuasion) and I'd like to let the whole open source community see them first hand. So, hack on, dude! Nirvana is the first email client written in SWT. Period. Nirvana is also the first email client written in SwingWT. (the former rather follows the latter though, so I really didn't need to tell you that, did I?) This means that the native widget set is used in the application. This means less memory, better responsiveness in the GUI, and that oh-so-stylish GTK theme prominently displayed in your window. Oh, and if you are using Windows XP (you wouldn't use anything less, would you?) Nirvana will display that theme too. Nirvana can access that free Hotmail/Yahoo! account that everyone has somewhere. This means that you won't have to break out Mozilla every time you want to check your mail. Instead, just access your account with the same ease that you get while accessing your company account. All this without plunking down the money for the POP/SMTP forwarding service. Who wants to spend that kind of money anyway? I'm sure you'll find a lot more to get excited about if you browse the source a little bit. Nirvana is written in Java, C, and C++ so be prepared. But at the same time be ready for some surprises. It's an interesting distribution model. |