Tell HN: I just open-sourced the e-mail client I spent 2 years of my life on

Re:Tell HN: I just open-sourced the e-mail client I spent 2 ... by Blunt on Friday October 07, 2011 @08:48PM (#3086643)

First of all, Thank you for the contribution to the OSS community but I just have to ask one question. With all the language wars and what not:

1. This is written in C#, correct? 2. Two full years of your life - do you literally mean 40+ Hours/week?

If this took two full years as in 40hours/week or working on it full time, I'm shocked it took two years. SMTP, POP3, and IMAPv4 are exceedingly simple protocols and the UI just seems to look like standard controls, no custom UI elements. Just had to ask.

I know I could probably whip together a decent email client in C++ within a couple months from scratch and maybe a week or two if I used any number of libraries out there.

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Re:Tell HN: I just open-sourced the e-mail client I spent 2 ... by waseemsadiq on Friday October 07, 2011 @09:04PM (#3086672)

1. correct 2. not as a paying fulltime job, but still probably around 30-40 hours a week 3. good luck with that, I also thought I could whip up the first version in 3 months... :-) Its not writing the code that takes so damn long its getting the machine and the user experience/expectance aligned.

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Re:Tell HN: I just open-sourced the e-mail client I spent 2 ... by teyc on Saturday October 08, 2011 @08:02PM (#3089207)

thank you for being so honest.

A full answer would take a whole book, but could you outline what part of the process was unwieldy, and what you had to rewrite as you learned more about the user experience?

In particular, since you are using WPF, would you have altered your prototyping process so that it was more user experience focussed?

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Re:Tell HN: I just open-sourced the e-mail client I spent 2 ... by waseemsadiq on Monday October 10, 2011 @07:32AM (#3093309)

I will probably do a full blog post today on all the questions asked here then submit that to HN

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Re:Tell HN: I just open-sourced the e-mail client I spent 2 ... by ataranto on Saturday October 08, 2011 @04:51PM (#3088874)

"I know I could probably whip together a decent email client in C++ within a couple months from scratch and maybe a week or two if I used any number of libraries out there."

Want to know how I know that you've never written an email client?

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