11Jun / 2008

Go West Young Man!

This Thursday I take permanent leave of Boston to make my new home in lovely Vancouver, BC. Boston has been my home for over 4 years now and after growing up in neighboring NH I honestly never thought I’d be back here this long.

Boston Skyline @ 4:45am by StarrGazr License:

Though it won’t be the place I’ll miss, it’s my friends and I wish they were coming with me. I’ve tried to convince several of them to do that. Why can’t we all live in the same place?

On Tuesday my u-pack boxes arrived and I squeezed in all the possessions I hadn’t thrown out in the last couple weeks and feel are worth bringing across the country. I actually don’t have many of these things even though they add up quickly. On Friday Moose and I will have left Boston on a grand trip across the states.

Moose is too old to fly anymore, he might not even make this trip in the car, not really; he should be fine. But luckily I won’t be alone with a dog who farts a lot as two of my best friends and I are cramming into my little car to catch baseball games on the road as we make our way from one coast to the next. Thus our route isn’t a clear shot from one place to the next.

I will be partially online during the trip, uploading photos of baseball stadiums, cities, arches, and other parks along the way. I also want to keep up with all the changes we’ve got planned, Thunderbird is starting to make so much progress it would be crazy to take too much time off right now.

Vancouver skyline at night by istargazer License:

Thanks to everyone I’ve met in Boston, all the friends I’ve made. Please come visit me in Vancouver.

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10Jun / 2008

You can learn a lot from TV

I used to think that Bill Clinton was the first black president, but of course that loose fact could easily be replaced if we had a real first black president. Until The Colbert Report Threat Down last night revealed a little known fact about the history of the USA; the title has already been taken by Warren Gansta Harding. Aren’t pundits great?

Secret Negro Presidents.

He just keeps getting crazier

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04Jun / 2008

Activity is the new download

So hip, just like silver is the new gold

Last week I began some work on some ideas for a richer, interactive user notification system for Thunderbird.

Status Bar

Currently the status bar acts as one of the only notification systems to the user. However the status bar is a steady stream of temporal plain text messages. The messages are helpful if you understand what they are indicating, otherwise to most people they only convey general activity happening. In general the messages end up lacking meaning because there is too much information running by.

A First Approach

Initially I took an approach of an interactive status bar that looked a little bit like the awesome bar replacing the status bar. Instead of just giving plain text messages we could make richer messages with visualizations.

Linked Messages
Progress Meters

The linked message could open thunderbird up to the account or message they were referring to. Next is to add some access to status history where people can see a list of what Thunderbird had done and perform actions (like restart) on those past activities.

History of Activity
Interactive History Items

The New Download

After seeing the amazing work that has been done on the download manager in firefox it seemed like a good second approach to the problem could be to reuse much of what they’ve done.

The download manager in firefox is solving a similar set of problems. We want to allow people to watch the progress of a specific set of (likely asynchronous) activities. We also want to ensure that people can view the list of past activities in case they want to manage them.

Should we continue using a simple text status message? The progress bar included in the status bar gives a visualization for time to complete an action. But do we need to help people visualize what is happening in the background?

And then instead of an inline popup for the history list we open up the download manager window which allows for searching and management of items inside the list.

Nothing is set yet, most likely a final version will be taking bits of both approaches. Still lots of work to go, more comments and ideas are always appreciated!

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