Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 with tabs

Last week I got a new MacBook Pro to replace my (two year) old one.  Among the problems with the old machine was a perennial lack of space on the hard drive.  I kept having to compress, archive, and throw away files to keep myself (barely) in the black.

The new machine's drive is twice as big, and that means plenty of space to build updated packages of Thunderbird 2 with my tabs patch based on the just-released Thunderbird 2.0.0.16.  The packages are available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.

If you are the adventurous type, however, check out the Thunderbird team's 3.0 alpha releases, which have tabs built-in by default.  And note the discussion on an experimental message view that aims to come up with an even better approach to opening multiple messages.

Incidentally, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here.  The only reason I can build these at all is because Mozilla's build/release team puts hard work into maintaining a build system and toolchain that makes it relatively easy to compile this several-year-old codebase even on new hardware running recent versions of all three operating systems.  Kudos and many thanks to them.

Snowl: an experiment with messaging in the browser

Last August, after Mitchell blogged about the future of email and penned an email call to action, I posted some thoughts about what a next-generation conversations app might look like.  I've kept thinking about it since then, and several months ago I proposed a labs experiment to build a Firefox extension that tries out some of those ideas.

Lots of users use desktop applications like Thunderbird and Apple Mail to converse with each other online, while many others use web apps, including not only webmail but also social networks, web discussion forums, and other site/service-specific tools.  Is there a role for Firefox in this mix?

That's the key question I'm trying to answer.

I've been hacking on a prototype on and off since then.  It's not quite usable yet, but it's getting there.  It currently has basic support for subscribing to, searching, and browsing messages from feeds via two views: a list view similar to a three-pane email application's interface and a variant of the "river of news" view described by Dave Winer.

I plan to have a 0.1 version of the prototype ready by the Mozilla Summit in two weeks, where I've proposed a session to present and discuss the experiment.  In the meantime, adventurous readers are welcome to check out the source and send me feedback via comments on this blog post, email, IRC, Facebook, your own blog post that references this one, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth.

Why I Host Projects on Mozdev

I've been using Mozdev for almost eight years, ever since it started hosting Forumzilla, my project to build a Mozilla-based web forum reader (which eventually became a Thunderbird extension and then Thunderbird's built-in feed reading feature).

Mozdev plays the critical role in the Mozilla community of hosting Mozilla-related projects that aren't considered core enough to the Mozilla mission to host on official community infrastructure.  It's a great adjunct to AMO, which distributes many of the projects that Mozdev hosts.

Over the years, I've been happy to host a number of such projects there, including the aforementioned Forumzilla plus Bugxula (defunct), Tinderstatus, and revision control/bug tracking for the Labs project Personas.

Although there have always been alternatives, they have been unpalatable: SourceForge has a cumbersome and unfamiliar interface, and hosting on my own server would have meant doing all my own systems administration.  I use Mozdev because I want to focus on my projects, not on the infrastructure for developing them.

Over the last couple of years, Google Code has become an option.  Although it provides much less functionality than Mozdev (and limits how many projects you can create), it does have a simpler interface and a more modern revision control system.

The folks who run Mozdev (which includes me) want simplicity and modern services (without sacrificing power) for Mozdev too, and we've identified three priorities in that regard: adding Mercurial for revision control, implementing WYSIWYG content editing, and automating project creation and management.

So I'm thrilled to read Mozdev developer Doug Warner's announcement today, via a post to the project owners mailing list, that he has landed Mercurial support.  Now you can get all the goodness of Hg hosted on your behalf for any of your Mozilla-related projects.

Eight years later, I think Mozdev remains the best place to host my projects, and it's just getting better.  I can't wait to see what's next (and I have some ideas about what simple WYSIWYG editing could look like, about which more soon).