Spent some downtime Sunday reading Getting Things Done (GTD) after previously talking about it I picked up a copy a couple weeks ago and have been running through it in my spare time. I probably talk about the book too much already and am boring everyone with my fascination over the classic email overload problem.
Another great source of similar information is Merlin Mann’s thoughts at Inbox Zero. If you haven’t seen his Inbox Zero talk, take about 40 minutes right now to watch it.
Here a link for the Video for Merlin’s “Inbox Zero” talk
- Cleanup existing functionality, currently a short list of bugs; some of which are larger than others
- Extensions, STEEL and Better Guides to Building Extensions
- Calendar Integration
- Search Improvements
I already started some work on Thunderbird and the tabbing interface by interviewing people about what they use tabs for in their browser and what tabs mean to them. Should be posting some of that information shortly.
As if you don’t have enough work to do on the things you’ve posted about, I have another idea for you:
Look at attachments. I’m specifically talking about large image attachments. Today I got a mail from my dad with about 8MB worth of jpegs of several baby squirrels that he saw near his house. Cute.
Actually, I just noticed that his mail exposed a gigantic bug which I’ll have to look into later, but disregarding that for a moment: Thunderbird won’t let me do anything with that whole account while it downloads attachments, which it does without my asking. 8MB isn’t very much, but my mail server was feeling particularly sluggish this morning and so it took a while. Thunderbird also insists on embedding all of the several-megapixel jpegs into the message view – useless, as they’re each about 4 times the size of my entire screen. And then it has that attachment pane. Why is that separate from the message?
Possible solution: Don’t put the full-size images directly into the message. Ditch the attachment pane and give me generic jpeg icons at the end of the message (bonus points for DnD support). If you *do* automatically download the attachments, replace the icons with thumbnails when you can. Also allow me to continue reading mail on that account while you fetch the attachments, please
What happens when you click on the icons/thumbnails? Well, Thunderbird can already display images; you could either open them in a new window (scaled to fit it, click to fully expand) when I double-click, or show them in a full-window lightbox when I single-click.
Pingback: Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » You had me at hello