All Posts Tagged With: "519"

Wow, it has been a very busy week online. Here are a few things I enjoyed from around the blogosphere this week:

• The Simple Dollar shares their 30 Essential Open Source software. Included are the usual suspects, but also a few others have been thrown in that you may not know about.
• Ashwin guest posted over at Life Rocks, where he explains how to edit your blog theme without messing up. Included is a theme preview plugin and some great tips to making sure you can restore things to normal if something goes wrong.
• Daily Blog Tips gives us tips for writing bookmarkable content. Rather than writing news posts, I tend to write a lot more of these types of posts that are intended to be references, so I found this post particularly useful.
• Blogging Tips provides simple secrets to blogging productivity. The post focuses on improving productivity with keyboard shortcuts. I’ve been working on improving my productivity for a few weeks now by applying various shortcuts to applications I use regularly.
• Paul Stamatiou has posted his early impressions of Mint, which is a web-based application that helps you with money management. It looks like he has been testing it for awhile now and even covers many people’s main concern, which is security with your financial information.
• Firefox Extension Guru talks a bit about what is in store for Thunderbird. Things were looking pretty bad for our favorite Microsoft Outlook alternative for awhile there, so it is good to see that the future is getting a little brighter.
• Garry Conn has started a new website called UTube Skins. This site allows people to spice up the appearance of their YouTube videos a little bit whenever one is posted on your blog by adding a skin around it. One example is a television monitor that fits around the video to make it look like you are watching TV.

Wow, what a depressing day for Thunderbird fans!   According to several reports from all over the place, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker announced on her blog that they feel that they are not able to devote the time and resources that are needed for Thunderbird to thrive.   As a result, they are exploring a few different possible futures for the e-mail client so that they can focus on Firefox.  While this is definitely a good thing for Firefox, this could be disastrous for Thunderbird fans around the globe.  How will this work?  Here are the 3 options they have provided:

1. Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation - a Thunderbird foundation. If it turns out Thunderbird generates a revenue model from the product as Firefox does, then a Thunderbird foundation could follow the Mozilla Foundation model and create a subsidiary.This model probably offers the maximum independence for Thunderbird. But it is also the most organizationally complex.
2. Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird. This has less overhead, although it still requires a new company that serves the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. In this case the Mozilla Foundation board and personnel would remain involved in Thunderbird. The Thunderbird effort may therefore still end up with less focus and less flexibility.
3. Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey or Camino, and a small independent services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users. Many open source projects use this model.  

No matter which one they go with, as a Thunderbird user it doesn’t look good for the future of the e-mail client I enjoy.  Under Mozilla’s supervision, the e-mail client was improving at a very slow pace, but it was being improved regularly.   Now that it looks like the project won’t be supervised by Mozilla any longer, we may see more progress and focus on the desktop e-mail client, or it may just disappear all together. 

In my opinion, they need an integrated calendar such as Microsoft Outlook offers to be considered a true competitor to Microsoft Outlook.  Sunbird is a very capable extension for personal use, but it isn’t going to work for major corporations that need this feature built-in and functional before making the switch. 

This is definitely wishful thinking, but I would like to see Google take over the Thunderbird project, add a functional built-in calendar system, and of course add my tabbed e-mails I’ve been waiting for!  It is already easily linked with GMail, so it could also unofficially serve as a desktop version of GMail.   The time and money Google could contribute, along with the power of the open source community could combine to make a pretty powerful desktop e-mail client.  

There is no doubt in my mind that as people get away from relying on Microsoft’s Office suite (for OpenOffice, Google’s Online Suite, or Zoho), they will be more open to ditching Microsoft Outlook.  This is because I feel Outlook’s integration with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access are probably it’s biggest selling points, especially to large corporations.   Google could really take advantage of this, while doing a great service for the open source community.  

What do you think?  Sound off in the comments below!

Since the recent release of Thunderbird 2.0, there has been rampant speculation about the features in Thunderbird 3.0. The most anticipated feature is something that I’m not aware of any other e-mail services having, and that is Firefox-style tabs. I was happy to see today that now it has finally been confirmed that the ability to open messages in tabs has been added to Thunderbird in-development code. Mozilla Links has provided this screenshot showing how the tabs currently look:

How sweet will this be? This is something that will give desktop e-mail users a good reason to finally make that switch from Microsoft Office. I currently use both in some form, but I think I could permanently switch to Thunderbird with this addition.

In other Thunderbird news, the Firefox Extension Guru offers tips on how to access Thunderbird’s About Config.