PopOver 2.0 Beta

History

One of the greatest needs of the NEXTSTEP community in its early inception was POP and IMAP mail connectivity. Eidolon wrote and released, free of charge, the early versions of PopOver. At the time, PopOver was a simple mail transfer agent, pulling your mail from a remote server and placing it in your normal spool directory on your local machine. This was a very powerful paradigm, allowing users the ability to add POP and IMAP connectivity to their machines, and still have the ability to use NeXT's default mail application (or any other mailer, for that matter).

Over the years, PopOver was enhanced to handle more sophisticated situations, and became a very robust, popular transfer agent.

With its latest incarnation, PopOver has dramatically changed from a non-intrusive transfer agent, to a full-blown mail application. Very easy to use, PopOver provided a great boon to the general users of the NEXTSTEP community. However, many people had difficulty setting up their machines to send mail. The natural extension was to modify PopOver to handle outbound transmission of mail.

In today's modern electronic world, sending simple plain text e-mail is no longer reasonable. Full multimedia reading and composition is a must, and PopOver had to be capable of dealing with these sophisticated forms of composition and reading.

With the introduction of OPENSTEP, and the transition of the code base to Windows, it became imperative to be able to communicate with other multimedia enabled users under that platform. Consequently, PopOver was further enhanced to support the far more prevalent Windows platform.

For those people using Windows, PopOver should be a great boon; most mail agents under Windows lack the sophistication and elegance of NeXT's multimedia mail applications. PopOver fills this gaping void, allowing users to communicate with others in MIME, or the more prevalent NeXTmail.

For MacOS X users, PopOver should prove as easy to use as any other Macintosh application, with as much power as one could hope for from a mail client.

With changing standards being released almost daily, it's also necessary to have an application that's flexible and dynamic. PopOver 2.0 was designed from the ground up with that goal in mind. The more sophisticated user can use the PopOver Development Kit to create dynamic modules that can do very sophisticated things, from something as simple as URL recognition, to something as complex as encryption or MIME. In fact, most of the functionality of PopOver is found in these "dynamic modules," modules that just happen to come bundled with the application.

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