Mozilla Messaging Devs Don't Want To Duplicate Outlook 355
Petr Krcmar writes "Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 1 was released last month. A few months before, two main developers left the project and development was moved from the Mozilla Corporation to the Mozilla Messaging, the new subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. We had the opportunity to ask some questions to David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging CEO. The interview is about present and future of Thunderbird and about related projects like SeaMonkey, Spicebird and Mozilla Calendar."
Nice Article, Misleading Summary. (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing should be ruled out. An Outlook like summary page, sync and what not could easily happen.
All we can be sure of is high quality and something users will like. I like Kontact's layout and feature set, which is much larger and more flexible than Outlook. It would not surprise me to see something better from the Mozilla team, but I won't be disapointed if the interface is what I'm used to. He goes on to mention social networks. This is exciting, but I'm not sure today's social networks do enough to protect their users from advertisers and other fraudsters.
Re:Nice Article, Misleading Summary. (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, it's good enough - I don't have much to complain about and I still like it a lot more than Outlook.
Re:Pfff... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sync (Score:3, Interesting)
What you *could* do is purchase an Exchange seat with 1and1.com for $6.99/mo.
For that, you get a copy of the latest Outlook, you get an Exchange seat @yourdomain.com, you get antivirus & antispam, active sync, Outlook Web Access, 1GB of space.
Since this is Exchange, you can do OTA sync too.
$6.99/mo. That's pretty cheap. There is a free 3 month trial right now.
1and1.com [1and1.com]
Re:Thunderbird 3 Alpha 1 Screenshot (Score:5, Interesting)
Inbox
>Account1
>Account2
>Account3
Sent
>Account1
>Account2
>Account3
Trash
>Account1
>Account2
>Account3
If I click on "Inbox" (first line above), I see all messages in all the Inboxes in all three accounts. If I want to just see the Inbox for Account1, I can click on that instead (second line).
Thunderbird and others seem to be convinced that everyone wants to break up everything based on accounts. Does anyone know the UI reasoning for this?
Re:Thunderbird, Mozilla Mail's Worst Misfeature (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, no; 80 characters is entirely wrong. We don't use punched cards any more (though I do have a small stack of them as souvenirs of the Bad Old Days
I can see the objection that most email software can't do this, because it can't see the window that the email will (eventually) be displayed in. But such software has no business doing line wrapping at all. Line wrapping is to make the text readable on the user's screen. So it should be done only by the software that's actually putting the text onto the user's screen.
Doing line wrapping to any fixed size, or before the final rendering, is simply user-hostile and should be publicly mocked by any sensible users.
The author used to call me for tech support (Score:3, Interesting)
One of its features, which could be disabled, was to verify that there were two spaces after each period. The author of the Mac is Not a Typewriter would call me now and then to complain about it. He wanted me to change it to verify that there is just one space.
I always meant to allow it as an option, but just never got around to it.
Now, he has a point, that software ought to be able to handle the extra space needed at the end of sentences. But I've never used an application that did, and have always found it necessary to use two spaces to get the right typography.
A program that did it right would have to be able to parse natural language, because you want extra space at the end of sentences but not after abbreviations.
CRM Integration (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The author used to call me for tech support (Score:3, Interesting)
In any case, a lot of software written now is based on that assumption. The HTML spec, for example, will strip all but one space if more than one space is typed in a row.
Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes! (Score:4, Interesting)
Will the newly opened Exchange APIs help? (Score:4, Interesting)
For email, I find Thunderbird wins with no contest. I hate everything about Outlook's email handling. The billion different places that options and settings are stored, stationery, the fonts, the crappy way links are handled if you change to plain text only....gah! But the shared contacts, calendaring, and syncing are excellent. Lightning was OK, but I could never get it to work well as a task-oriented work process as I could with Outlook. However, Lightning's handling of multiple calendars (Google calendar connector specifically) I feel is much better.
Depending on how things pan out, how does it fare for Tbird if the Exchange APIs are actually released and work? Outlook's muscle comes from the tight integration to Exchange. If I could use Thunderbird/Lightning but get all of the groupware benefits of Exchange, hopefully with improved Task handling...then I think they'd really be on to something!
Re:Vowels (Score:1, Interesting)
Czech can use "l" or "r" to form syllables instead of vowels, so you get words like "vlk", "srp", "krk" and lovely sentences like "Strc prst skrz krk"
Re:As well they shoouldn't (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, this sucks. Usenet-style quoting is definitely better. However, it's important to understand why it was done this way (or at least why I think it was done this way), because it is not accidental. Most users of Outlook like this behavior. They want to be able to forward a big "stack" of messages, a whole chain of replies and replies-to-replies, around the office.
Why? Because it's easier to cover your ass that way, that's why. When you forward an email in Outlook, you're not just forwarding a single message (usually), you're forwarding the whole thread.
If you want to envision the paper-world use case that approximates Outlook, think of people passing memos around. Someone gets a stack of memos, they read through them, compose their own memo, and staple it to the top of the stack, and then pass it along. You typically do not -- and probably don't want -- people editing and chopping up other people's replies. (Yeah, they can -- there's no security involved -- and that's a big weakness.) If they want to include something that somebody else said, then they just type it into their memo, attributing it (or not) just as they would in a regular standalone letter or memo.
The disconnect between "the Usenet way" and "the Outlook way" is because the Usenet way is driven by people who honestly want to exchange information in the most efficient way possible. That is not the goal of most business communication. The goal of most Outlook users is to CMA and look smart for the boss.
Re:As well they shoouldn't (Score:2, Interesting)
I think (see my other post) that the major driver of Outlook's behavior is the business use case, where people want to keep a whole thread of messages together as they forward and reply.
However, it's probably equally important that Outlook is really designed as an intranet mail solution, not an Internet one. And when everybody's on a relatively fast LAN, shuttling really bloated email messages around isn't as much of a problem as it is on the Internet. Since the cost of quoting every message in a long thread in full is relatively low, there's no reason not to do it.
It's worth pointing out that some other intranet email systems (e.g. Lotus Notes) do this as well, when you reply and quote the original message. (Although I don't remember whether Notes' default is to quote or not.) Notes is even designed so you can expand and collapse the chain of quoted messages.
Where Outlook's behavior becomes really obnoxious is when it started being used for Internet email, rather than just intranet mail, because that's when you start noticing the 50 pages of replies-to-replies that are attached to every one-line message. And it's even worse when you start using mobile devices.
Re:Vowels (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, yes, it's all Latin script. But Latin script is not very well suited to Slavic languages, which have introduced a variety of new letters which I cannot repeat here. Instead of transcribing those, most times English speakers simply strip the diacritics and mangle the pronunciation.
Budapest is spelled just like that in Hungarian; English speakers just mangle the pronunciation. /.) is first stripped, then mangled up in pronunciation. Many a last name in former Yugoslavia ends in -i[cacute], which is most closely pronounced as -itch (no point in trying to make English speakers distinguish between ccaron and cacute anyway), but when stripped to -ic is pronounced as [ik].
Any Slavic name containing a ccaron, cacute, zcaron, scaron (type them up between &;s somewhere other than
This is the rough equivalent of me pronouncing your name John as [Yochn], just because it is spelled like that, and Slavic languages are rather phonetically spelled. This is why the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in the first place.
For instance, if Croatian still used the Cyrillic alphabet, most of our problems with sorting would disappear: our digraphs lj, nj, and d[zcaron] would always be represented as single characters (which has become possible with Unicode, but nobody ever uses those, as they would require complicated find/replace rules).
So no, it's not "all Latin script".
Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html [jwz.org]
Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.
"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from 'unchecked' to 'checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."
Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway.
Users GOOD
If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.
When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.
Ok, I said it was a funny story, but obviously that's not the funny part, unless sad is funny.
I think he wrote another article on the utter idiocy of rewriting Netscape so the code became nice and easy to read too. In both cases he's basically sick of humouring bright people who have completely lost touch with reality because they are stuck in their own little world of refactoring or business alliances or open source. Anything that convinces bright people that they don't need to solve hard problems, just apply some "magic pixie dust" that will make those hard problems all disappear.
And now he's running a bar. I wonder how long before I am.
Re:PIM as Social Network Tool? Yes! (Score:2, Interesting)
End user's I deal with care allot about "workflow". Perhaps software on the home PC is about making people happy - at least for the small [yes, it is small] portion of the population that spends time every day on social networking sites and the like. But most of the software used every day is for the purpose of doing work.
I guess he would think a mail client that integrates with MySpace is a killer app.
You have to like someone who says this
"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from 'unchecked' to 'checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."
Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway.
Which really is the point. Even if you can make money out of "that shit", do you really want to? When you were at University, did you really think you'd be a replaceable cog in a big machine, with an average salary (until your job is outsourced or right sized away), producing a inferior clone of Lotus Notes so that people could file their TPS reports online? Fuck that. I wanted to be a Pirate Of Silicon Valley or a video game programmer. At any rate someone who would either make it big through Godlike business and coding skill or crash and burn spectacularly.
Ah well, I suppose I should let you go back to filling in your WebTPS report. If you ever decide to go postal, please kill the people in my rival department, not me ktxbye.