This Thursday at 11am PST will mark the beginning the the Spring GT race season in Vancouver. Mozilla Vancouver is set to take on a number of other local companies like Nitobi, mainsocial, KRANKY cafe, and others in several rounds of go-kart racing. Albury Wodonga Go Karts 27-09-2009 0016 by racestarphotos cc:by-nc-nd If you’re in [...]

Looking at the announcement of the Facebook Graph API from Facebook F8 it seems like it will be a little easier to work with the Facebook system. In Raindrop we already have some integration with Facebook in order to identify emails coming from the Facebook system and help you filter them out. But there is [...]

Today we’ve released a new add-on the Mozilla Messaging team has been working on for a little while, the Quick Filter.  A new single folder search and filter system that will work alongside our previously released Thunderbird global search. The Quick Filter add-on is reminiscent of the old quick search system of Thunderbird 2.0  but [...]

Colin Dean converted the code from my post on Google Calendar in Thunderbird tabs and created a GMail tab for Thunderbird. If you’re interested in trying what a web application would look like running inside a Thunderbird tab without modifying an extension use the following code snippet. Open the Error Console from the Tools Menu [...]

If you’re a Google Calendar user like myself you might want to check out this really simple add-on for Thunderbird, which should be available as an official add-on for the coming Thunderbird 3 release. The Google Calendar Tab As simple as it sounds, this adds the Google Calendar web interface as a new tab directly [...]

The other day I did a quick hack using Raindrop & Jetpack to get new mail notifications from Raindrop.  In total it took me less than an hour.  It’s no Joe Shaw hack, so I don’t expect to get in the paper for this but I figured I’d share anyway. This Jetpack checks Raindrop to [...]

Today Mozilla Messaging released the Raindrop project Raindrop is an experiment in the design of a new messaging platform in the open. What I like most about Raindrop is our process.  We started with some simple designs, created a couple iterations and now we’ve opened up the whole process to share.  This isn’t another email [...]

Lately I’ve been working a lot on the Thunderbird add-ons developers user experience.  Often times designers don’t get to work on developer experiences because developers tend to do those pieces themselves without much design.  With a lot of others I’ve spent a good amount of time working on the whole experience of development, docs, and [...]

This past Friday I made my first Jetpack and on Sunday while lazily waiting for chores to finish themselves I posted my Jetpack on userscripts.org. Bugzilla – Air Traffic Control For Jetpackers a mid-air collision is an especially scary thing. So this Jetpack does a pretty simple thing to help you avoid the mid-air collision [...]

My bus ride home trippled in time last night because of some construction so I had the opportunity to watch this TED talk. This really drove home the power of defaults in user interface choices and how it is the responsibility of good designers to default to the right behaviour, especially when the options are [...]

I always advocate against simple (and especially modal) dialogs in user interfaces because they aren’t there to help the user get past the problem, more like work through the emotional issues the software is having. Dialogs aren’t the real evil, though they usually aren’t great, it’s the lack of real negotiation.  In the book Getting [...]

How do you make the dualbutton always appear like the last two sets of screenshots (as it does on hover)? I’m looking to make dualbuttons always show their dropdown button with a real button like look.  This dualbutton reply button is  going to land in Thunderbird 3 soon and I’d like the style to look [...]

For bug 484166 we’re moving away from the old search icon  to the newer Firefox search icon .  Included in this change we need to ensure this icon works for RTL as well as LTR.   With bug 481860 offering a way to use css to transform the image I just needed to test that the [...]

I just installed the Earth Hour plugin for wordpress.  So if you’re trying to read my blog this Saturday during Earth Hour you’ll be getting less pixels than normal. After which transmission will continue normally, the same spotty and random posts as ever.

It’s been a little while since the release of Thunderbird beta 2 and today we’re automatically offering the upgrade to all our existing alpha and beta users. Upgrading from Previous Development Releases At 12:00pm today (12:00 PDT) updates will start to be picked up by Thunderbird Alpha and Beta users.  In the following 24 – [...]

Budget Truck rental of Canada has some special promotions available when you reserve via their web site. However you actually can’t reserve trucks via the web site.  You have to call the locations. When you call the location it goes something like this. You: I would like to reserve a truck for next week.  I [...]

I like to look at this painting every so often to remind myself how things can go so wrong even when they seem like they are going right. If you haven’t seen this image before, the description of the project is amazing.  An effort to find the “People’s Choice” art award a market survey queried [...]

Over the past year the Thunderbird platform has received a large number of updates, however it is also seeing a number of improvements to it’s over all user experience.   In a recent email I tried to write out some of the major improvements that are in the works for the next bird release, here’s a [...]

I’m eagerly downloading the latest Intelligence Squared debate, Bush 43 is the worst president of the last 50 years.  What makes this especially interesting to me is the fact that Karl Rove is participating in the debate the panel, arguing against the motion.

It’s been a while since my first post on the Activity Manager for Thunderbird.  There was a lot of positive feedback from an Activity Manager talk we gave in Barcelona for the EU Mozcamp.  And since that time there has been quite a bit of progress on the Activity Manager code. Emre recently landed a [...]