Wanna work on Thunderbird Conversations? We need help!
By Jonathan Protzenko on Thursday, May 19 2011, 21:53 - mozilla - Permalink
I started working on Thunderbird Conversations pretty much 18 months ago, and it's grown from a quick hack to a fully-fledged re-implementation of the whole message-reading process in Thunderbird. It now integrates very nicely with the rest of Thunderbird, and I've put a lot of effort into making sure we comply with the bazillion options Thunderbird has. I believe it is a very viable replacement for the standard message reader, and I do have great hopes that the next version (compatible with the upcoming Thunderbird 3.3) will fulfill most people's desires when it comes to a conversation view.
The development has been quiet for quite some time now, as Thunderbird Conversations is slowly becoming more and more feature complete. There's some big, low-priority items that I tackle when I feel really motivated, but apart from that, I'd say this works really fine on a day-to-day basis. However, I'm pretty much alone on this. Coding is fine, but I'm bad at design, and I need a hand to help me polish the UI before the final release.
Here's a list of easy items that you can tackle if you have an hour or two:
- bug 157: experiment with a nicer look for nested blockquotes. Right now, we have this ugly set of colors that feels so 1998-ish, and we could probably use something more modern.
- bug 182 and bug 184: there's a few windows that might pop up at some point ("Give feedback", "Indexing warning", "Setup assistant"). I designed these by shamelessly stealing the graphics from mozillamessaging.com. They could probably use some visual love, and be more consistent with the rest of the Conversations UI. We also have a phishing warning, but the icon doesn't blend well. This could use some help too.
- bug 189: make sure people with a dark theme still can use Conversations. Right now, we assume the default text color is black. This is not always the case, and it breaks things for people who have dark themes. We don't necessarily want to respect the system colors, but we should at least make sure Conversations is usable.
- bug 257: the icons in the conversation toolbar are not aligned.
All these items are probably trivial for someone who's good at UI. I'm pretty bad at it, and most of these items would require me to spend too much time on them, for a less-than-satisfactory result in the end. So if you're good at these things, just drop me an email, or find me on irc.mozilla.org in #maildev (:protz). I'll provide guidance and help you get started with the Conversations source code.
Thanks!
Comments
Please make sure you take care of the memory usage.
Last time I tried it, it couldn't handle my gmail bugmail account (nowadays close to 200000 messages), but just made TB to OOM crash.
Yes. The underlying sqlite database called "gloda" is what gives the thunderbird-wide structured representations: a conversation is made of messages, a message involves people, people are involved in other messages, etc.
This database is put under very much stress especially when using Conversations, which accounts for the slowness you may have experienced. The OOM crash should be fixed now.
My plans for the summer are to overhaul the internal database schemas so that there is a fast-path for Thunderbird Conversations that internally requires a minimum number of queries.
Thanks for making it possible to turn off the body tweaks--it's so much better now that the text is actually large enough for me to read (so I'll keep using it for awhile longer :D). One thing I really dislike about Gmail is that Google reduces the font-size to 80% of actual. (And, no, I don't customize the fonts or their sizes in Tb, and the text still looks *GREAT* after I turn off your body tweaks; 12px is too *SMALL*.) Thanks, again.