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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 – [...]

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 [...]

Thunderbird can finally do the Tango For a long time Thunderbird has been using the same theme for Linux and Windows, resulting in an ugly and out of place Linux theme.  However now Magnus has a patch is up to create a gnomestripe theme space.  Magnus already moved Thunderbird menus over to using the gtk [...]

The new Thundertab has (partially) landed in the nightly builds of Thunderbird.  You’ll need to get Lightning installed to see all this and it’s not too pretty yet, but we’re making lots of progress. But there’s no time to lose!  We’re already talking about how to handle tab session restore to keep all your opened [...]

I’ve been experimenting with how we can use tabs inside Thunderbird. The previous tabbing post already discussed how tabs help people to keep their current context and multi-task more flexibly.  I’ve created a number of designs that look into using tabs in Thunderbird so email users can have the same kind of power over their [...]

Interface design is hard work, so it’s really nice when someone else has done much of the heavy lifting for you and left their labor open to cherry picking.    The Mozilla platform has been getting a number of upgrades in large part due to the work of the Firefox team and thankfully I have [...]

Later today I’ll be giving a summit session on UX for Thunderbird.  The Thunderbird Dialog Invasion is one of the many topics to cover. non-flash formats available. ogg and wmv Watch it in a High Quality format. If you love Reggie and the Full Effect as much as I do you can grab his new [...]

I arrived in Vancouver on Tuesday July 1st after my long adventure across the country. I think all the sun, baseball parks, and driving ran down my system so after my friends left and I got 2 days of work in I spent the weekend sleeping. Cleveland Indians Detroit Tigers Chicago White Sox St. Louis [...]

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 [...]

Obviously after kicking so much ass there was nothing left for mr. banner to do but take names. What used to be an awkward set of instructions is about to become as simple as a checkbox. And yes this isn’t quite the feature that gets everyone laid (hopefully at least a couple people get laid).  [...]

Some news for the Thunderbird signatures in email.  I’ve updated the Message Signatures wiki page with some new possible directions. Signature Manager One still missing piece has been adding a signature manager.  Previously I mentioned that we could create a new dialog window for managing signatures, however several comments posted and emailed made me want [...]

Lately I’ve been asking a lot of different people, “Why do you use tabs?”, in reference to tabbed web browsers.  I wanted to do some quick and dirty research on the design and usage behind tabs; some of this is obvious yet it helps to have it written out. So here’s a bit of what [...]

Last week I was blitzed by being cc’d on a lot of email signature related bugs.   To remain calm and keep delusions of control active I started on a wiki page for Message Signatures in Thunderbird.  Right now the page contains lots of links to relevant areas and ascii art mockups for choosing a [...]

I’ve been doing some testing recently with Thunderbird and its offline support; trying to get a handle on what the state of the onion is.  One problem that has bothered me is the silent state of online to offline, not to mention the dialogs that happen after that. Communication How do you convey that Thunderbird [...]