Thunderbird Conversations 2.0 released
By Jonathan Protzenko on Tuesday, June 28 2011, 00:46 - mozilla - Permalink
Update: fixed the broken link for the manual
It is my pleasure to announce that after almost one year in development, Thunderbird Conversations 2.0 has been released! Thunderbird Conversations goes along Thunderbird 5, so go get the latest Thunderbird and...
Thunderbird Conversations is a Thunderbird addon that, as the name implies, equips your favorite email program with a fully-featured conversation view. This addon has been developed in close collaboration with the Thunderbird team, and much effort went into Thunderbird to make this happen.
Highlights include:
- a quick reply feature,
- tight integration with your Thunderbird workflow,
- contact tooltips,
- support for viewing a conversation in a tab,
- integration with other extensions (enigmail, lightning),
- quote collapsing,
- and many more.
While this is still an experiment, we believe that it is sufficiently stable for you to try it out, hence the 2.0 version number. Documentation is available on my personal website (should be integrated in the Thunderbird FLOSS Manual when the next version comes out).
We welcome any kind of feedback. For general discussion, the right place is the mozilla-labs google group. For bugs, please direct them to our GitHub bug tracker.
Known issues:
- many improvements have been made to Thunderbird to enhance its interaction with Conversations, which means only Thunderbird 5.0 will be compatible with Conversations 2.0,
- big messages (with attachments) that just arrived will be slow to render if you try to display them immediately: we have a fix both on the Thunderbird and the Conversations side, but we had to back it out due to a regression — we hope to have the fix included in Thunderbird 6,
- the print command (from the menu) doesn't print the conversation – please use the print icon from the conversation view, or use a recent Thunderbird 7 nightly, the fix should land soon,
- if you customized the default font settings, it might be that the conversation view has too small fonts: in that case, please revert your font settings to the defaults and read the thread on this topic.
Before reporting a bug, please try out both a recent nightly of Conversations (labeled "master", available at http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/gcv-nightlies/) and a recent build of Thunderbird 7, known as "Daily". If the issue doesn't go away, we'd be glad to hear about it!
Comments
"Thunderbird Conversations could not be installed because it is not compatible with SeaMonkey 2.2" (b1). Same result with nightly 201106281124-2.0b1+.xpi.
Any chance of it becoming compatible? Thanks for all you do.
I don't think there's any chance it will ever be compatible with Seamonkey. The code is pretty much entangled with Thunderbird, and I don't have the time nor the will to undertake a seamonkey port, sorry. You're welcome to fork the project, though, and make it work with seamonkey!
Congrats on the 2.0 release! Great to see it out, and especially now with a stable release of Thunderbird to go with it.
The addon had a few issues:
1) its super slow to load when switching messages in the message folder.
2) all the icons are too small on the message window which I don't even see a tooltip so I was more concerned if I clicked on the buttons it would do something strange.. I would put effort into making the buttons/icons larger and add some context because I had no idea what they where for.. so I just uninstalled the addon because of these things.. hard to get up to speed and is slow.. but its real pretty.. which I like.
So the "super slow" issue depends on your machine. We stress gloda (the GLObal DAtabase) very much, be we have plans to improve its internal data structures so that building a conversation is faster.
Concerning the icons, if you hover your mouse over the icons, there should definitely be a tooltip telling you what to do.
Overall, it's really very good! I have two requests:
1. Marking/tagging a conversation as Work/TODO/etc should not mark/tag the whole series of messages, only the most recently read one.
2. Keeping a current conversation selected, a new message in the same conversation is not marked as read unless I manually mark it as read (press R) or switch between conversations. I think new messages in a selected conversation should be marked as read after a while.
Thanks very much!
Hi,
1. How do you justify from a UX point of view this stance?
2. This is intentional, this is the avoid new messages in an already displayed conversation being marked silently as read if they arrive while Thunderbird is in the background. There's plans to improve this, though: https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conv...
1. Yes, I see what you mean, it is tricky. Multiple messages in a conversation could be simultaneously expanded. Nevertheless, might it not be better to simply mark those messages instead of the entire sequence?
Great addon! I haven't warmed to conversation views before this, but am giving it a try. Two very small wishes:
1. I'd like to add people to addBook more quickly (now hover, click plus, then click add). could you move that function to first popup?
2. I wish attachments were available from the top of the message, in addition to the bottom, so I wouldn't have to scroll down long messages.
Thanks for your efforts!