One of the products my company develops is called Eudoramail. It’s basically a continuation of the old Windows mail client “Eudora”, published by Qualcomm; after they shitcanned it, it kind of filtered down to us through Len Shustek of the Computer History Museum. There’s a long story there, Perforce Stingray, Datapak Paige (which we ended up buying and maintaining ourselves, as HERMES Paige) - anyhow, not germane to this forum since Eudoramail is not even really open source.
What is germane is that we recently developed a port of it for Haiku. Now, I’ll note I really don’t like cross-platform software. I mean, I’ll do it—grudgingly—if there’s a compelling reason; but if the targeted OS has a native SDK/toolkit, I’d prefer my team used it. (That’s part of why LibreOffice really is not one of my favourite packages; but then we’re guilty of the same sin, since we do have a Java app in our portfolio.) So, instead of doing a Qt or GTK port of our software, we decided that the “Windows” version would also run under Wine on Linux, and that the Haiku version would be purely for Haiku.
I know Beam has its fans on here, as does Haiku’s built-in mailer. Our proposition is a little different: Eudora for Mac, written by Steve Dorner, had a legion of fans back in the day—fans who consider the Windows port (yes, Hemera is a port of a port) to be inferior. Those fans included such luminaries as Steve Wozniak.
Now, the Eudora for Mac code is thoroughly unusable. It’s C code, in Carbon, purely 32-bit, doesn’t follow the modern style… but the compiled app is awesome. So we decided to bring that experience, the one Wozniak wouldn’t even surrender from his cold, dead hands, (more than the Windows version, which is MFC MDI + Perforce Stingray) to Haiku—but in a modern language, using a modern toolkit, and still keeping in mind that same old workflow.
Part of this project has also been to serve as a Haiku test bed for our Paige library; in the shape we originally got it, it touted Win 3.1 compatibility as a selling point in 2001ish(!)—not that surprising, since the original company that wrote it was one of those three-men-and-a-dog outfits where the president and EVP’s all had the same surname—and was plainly dated, but also plainly useful. So what we did was bring it into C++, with a first-class Haiku frontend, so it now serves rather well as a rich-text engine.
Anyhow, here’s the source:
