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Archive for December 15th, 2008


Posted on December 15, 2008 - by jono

Thunderbird 3 Beta

I decided recently to give a new mail client a whirl. Evolution, while an excellent client, appears to be a bit clunky with IMAP. I specifically have all of my mail go through GMail, and I access with IMAP. Evolution seems to be a bit slow when doing this. I had heard about the new IMAP speed enhancements in the Thunderbird 3, Beta so I figured I would give it a go.

Traditionally, I have not stuck with Thunderbird. I used to use it years ago, but I have got used to the integration niceties that Evolution gives me. I like that Evolution integrates into my desktop, gives me a nice panel applet, hooks into Tom Boy and my clock applet and other things. Right now Thunderbird still feels like an application that merely runs on top of the desktop as opposed to integrating into it. Thunderbird 3 is better with regards to this, but still has a way to go. So, I installed Thunderbird 3, installed the Tango theme Add In (to get as much integration as I can), adjusted my fonts to the same as Evolution and started trucking.

So far, it seems like a really nice client. Thunderbird offers some incredible opportunity. Messaging is a critical part of everyone’s use of computers, and Thunderbird has the opportunity to become a household name in this very area. It would be incredible to have a cross platform, native messaging application that talks to the different types of mail protocols and hooks into webmail services such as GMail. Fortunately, Thunderbird provides the guts of this approach: its IMAP and POP works well, and setting up GMail POP or IMAP access is a breeze.

There was however one snag with GMail IMAP access. Today Thunderbird threw the following dialog box at me:

Alert Dialog: Lockdown In Sector 4 (Failure)

This message is completely meaningless. Whoever is responsible for the error, Thunderbird or Google, should consider how on earth a regular user such as myself is going to interpret that message. It sounds like something from Doom III. After a bit of Googling it turns out that this error means that I have been locked out of GMail for up to 24 hours when it detects excessive traffic. This is strange for two reasons. Firstly, I have not been using excessive traffic: in fact, my email traffic dropped last week with UDS going on. Secondly, when I log into GMail via the web interface, everything works fine. So, it seems GMail is blocking access to Thunderbird. Arse.

I have never seen this when accessing GMail via Evolution. Maybe the Thunderbird folks should check into seeing if the client is hammering GMail too hard?

Overall, Thunderbird shows incredible promise, and as I said earlier, it contains pretty much all of the core functionality that I would need (of course, Windows fans will need Exchange support, and I am not sure of the progress on that). Where I would like to see Mozilla Messaging spend their time is on focusing on the integration side of the client and the user interface. In terms of integration we should see Thunderbird neatly fit into the desktop, taking on the resident theme, menu icons, accessibility, font settings, dialog button ordering, MIME types, and also have an unobtrusive panel applet for notifications (the current huge notification is ugly).

It would also be useful for Mozilla Messaging to spend some time on interaction testing. Some of the development work going into the exptoolbar is looking interesting, but I would love to see an assessment of how people work with mail, how approaches to messaging vary and how Thunderbird can capitalise on this.

Thunderbird offers an incredible opportunity for a client that feels native, effective and matches a variety of workflow approaches, making the most of Operating System integration and a consistent messaging platform. Keep us all updated Mozilla folks. :)


Posted on December 15, 2008 - by jono

UDS Killed The Radio Star

One of the most prominent new features of UDS Jaunty was our extensive use of video. Using eight cameras, a stack of SD cards, a bunch of tower machines encoding and an army of volunteers, we captured a significant chunk of UDS. Thanks to Chris Jones and James Troup for all their in getting the cameras up and running.

Firstly, we had video cameras in every track. Using volunteers at the event, we tried to record every session on every track. We currently have the first three days worth of sessions uploaded, and the final few days will be online soon. All of the videos are available in Ogg Theora format and you can grab them at videos.ubuntu.com. Sorry about the rather unobvious filenames right now: we plan on renaming them soon.

In addition to this, Tony Whitmore of the Ubuntu UK podcast and bloody nice bloke interviewed over 20 developers while at UDS. They have all been uploaded to the Ubuntu Developer Channel. Here are some rather convenient links to check them out (in order of when they were filmed):

That should keep you lovely people occupied for a while. Enjoy! :)


Posted on December 15, 2008 - by jono

The Gritty World Of User Interface Exploration

No blogging for a week. Was this due to lazyness? No. Was this due to writers block? No. So what was the reason? Well obviously it was because of the grandiose duo of crime-fighting elegance that was FossCamp and the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Prepare for a series of blog entries about some of the discussions and experiences that happened at these two events in the last week or so.

Also, a quick public service announcement. Please be a little patient with me with email: despite attempts to keep up last week, I have an almighty backlog of email and will be processing it as soon as I can.

I want to get started with a fascinating discussion that happened at FossCamp. A little while ago I wrote an article called The Flow Of Ideas. The basic gist was to encourage the development of user interface ideas and the opportunity for users to test said ideas easily, effectively and importantly, safely. It was an observation that in the GNOME world at least, the sharing of prototyped ideas has really helped drive innovation forward. The problem I want to solve here is in the sharing part of this problem.

At FossCamp I used the opportunity to discuss the idea. The concept behind the workflow was largely inspired by Firefox Add-Ins: the user should be able to select from a list of user interface experiments, and easily run them with a click of the mouse. Our goal should be to make these experiments as easy as possible for the developer to produce (write some code and focus on the idea and not maintenance) as well as easy to access for the user (install and run, easily and safely). We also have many areas in which we can draw influence. KDE have Get Hot New Stuff which is similar, and there are some other resources that make the sharing of ideas easy. Allison mentioned an MIT system that she drew some ideas from in the discussion, but I forgot to write it down. If you read this Allison, do let us know. :)

But the opportunity here is not in simply delivering the crack of the day to our users, it is in developers to easily create user interface experiences that our users can provide feedback on what works and what doesnt. Imagine if I could write up a small Python script that uses Glade and PyGTK that demonstrates a user interface idea. I want to share that idea with interested users and see what other ideas could be inspired from my concept. I also want to make the solicitation of feedback as no-brainer as possible. No subscribing to mailing lists. No account creation. I want it to be as simple as walking up to someone and saying “so, what did you think?“

There is nothing new in what I am suggesting, at least outside of IT. In the car industry, manufacturers produce concept cars. In the fashion world there are a range of convoluted and frankly ridiculous creations gliding down the catwalks. These innovations are never intended for the mass market, they are intended to show what is possible when the creative minds behind them can create with no restrictions.

We need to inspire our incredible community with this ethos. We should be encouraging anyone with a great idea to get it in front of our users so we can learn from these experiences together. Our community is a huge boiling pot of possibility and I imagine that many of these ideas will form the inspiration behind our future interfaces.

So, all in all an excellent discussion. But, that is not the end of the story. Ryan Lortie, a man officially renamed to Ryan “King Of The Universe” Lortie grabbed me while I was wandering through the venue and showed me that has started implementing the idea, naming it gritty:

“gritty: jono had one of the first sessions of fosscamp. his idea is that we’d have a lot more experimentation with the development of cool new software if it wasn’t so damned difficult to get your hacks on to other people’s machines. lowering the barrier to distribution would encourage people to share ideas. early exposure to users will encourage hackers to develop their ideas into proper projects. mvo and i have started hacking on a prototype for how this might work. gritty is a name chosen at random by mvo picking a number and me going to that line in /usr/share/dict/words (+/- about 10 lines… “groans” wasn’t such a good name). with any luck we can have a first version of this in jaunty”.

The man is a hero. Please tell him so. I can’t wait to see where the idea goes: I really genuinely feel like this kind of technology exploration could produce some fantastic opportunities for the Open Source desktop. Lets see what happens. :)