opinios

Thunderbird Wishlist

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my primary mail client, and love it. It has terrific anti-spam features and great support for RSS, which is important for someone like me who reads a lot of feeds; some browsers also support RSS, but when you are trying to stay on top of thirty or forty sites a browser just doesn't cut it, it needs an email-like interface.

However, there are quite a few things that annoy me about Thunderbird. I haven't looked through the list of bugs that the hard-working Mozilla team are squirrelling away on, but these are the features/bugs that I would love to see fixed before declaring this little application to be the ultimate mail client. I hope some of them are in the pipeline:

1. integration of calendar; there is a calendar component for Thunderbird, but it doesn't have the same level of integration that Outlook currently supports.
2. better RSS feed management: yes, I know I mentioned it does do a half-decent job, but
   • the blurred line between folders and feeds is confusing. If I delete a folder, the posts, are also deleted. But what happens to my subscription? Where do future posts go?
   • there's no way to sort managed feeds by name, URL, date added etc.
   • it automatically sorts feed posts by ascending date; I prefer descending, so that my most recent reads are at the top. Currently, each time you add a feed you have to re-sort this. It would be cool to be able to set a property where it did this by default.


3. same deal with email: you can't set an ascending date sort for new folders by default, only on a per-folder basis
4. a way of storing your list of feeds remotely (eg. on your own server much like IMAP email) would be way cool. I'd like to be able to read my feeds on different computers without having to configure them all manually. Yes, I know about bloglines, but I'd prefer it in my mail client.
5. It needs a more prominent indicator when communicating with the server. The tiny "receiving 1 of 2 messages" displayed in the status bar at the bottom is easy to miss.
6. better handling of multiple attachments is an absolute must. I subscribe to one mailing list which is delivered in digest mode, with up to 50 attachments. Unfortunately I can't read this at all with Thunderbird as there is no scroll bar when the list of attachments takes up all the message space. Very annoying.
7. The ability to turn off yes/no prompt when navigating using the previous/next buttons. That's just annoying too. What do you mean "Am I sure I want to move to the next folder?" Of course I'm sure, that's why I pressed "Next"!
8. Using the "Next" button sometimes jumps to the next folder that contains an unread message, but doesn't load the message, sometimes even when you highlight the message! Actually, the "Next" button gets confused quite often. If I am on unread message number 4 and click Next, it sometimes jumps to unread message number 1. Shouldn't it jump to the next folder?
9. The Spellbound inline spell checker plug-in works well, but highlighting with the keyboard gets screwed up. Especially if you use the Shift+arrow keys to do it.
10. Converting between HTML and raw text can get screwed up, even with simple formatting like bold and italics, which end up looking like *this* and /this/.
11. It would be nice to be able to control the "quote" character. Under the hood it's ">" but when editing it's a different colour line, whether you like it or not.
12. The other day Thunderbird crashed on me and lost track of which of my feeds were unread. When I launched it again it proceeded to pull in duplicates of every one of the posts I had already downloaded. This was when I realised how many feeds I subscribed to, when I had to go through each and every folder and set it as "unread".
13. Being able to choose between reading the raw text of a feed post or view the HTML page in the message body window is cool, but if the page is behind a login window, it's not quite so easy to configure. You can set things up so that your cookies from Firefox are used by Thunderbird, but it requires more technical know-how than should be expected of your average user.

Like I said, Thunderbird is a good product, and I don't mean to have a whinge especially when it is free! But if the things on this list were fixed up, it would be a fantastic product.

PS. If anyone knows how to set any of the above defaults by performing jiggery-pokery with the configuration files, speak up!

Colour in Motion

This has been around for a while, but if you haven't seen it and are interested in colour then you should take the time to watch this group of short Flash movies by Maria Claudia Cortes called Colour in Motion. A fantastic and fun way to represent colours, how to use them and what they represent.

What's in a meme?

I learned a new word from Cameron Adams today - meme - when he passed me a musical baton. Not to be confused with mame (god I want one of these!)

Here goes:

Total volume of music files on my computer:

410 MB (a few CDs and a few tracks recorded with the band when living in Tokyo. What's that? You didn't? Well, I was. And I played bass.) Most of my music is either on CD (gasp) or on the hard drive at work.

The last CD I bought was:

REM - Around the Sun. Back before I had a house deposit to save for.

Song playing right now:

Interpol - Evil

Five songs I listen to a lot/mean a lot to me:

• Radiohead - Optimistic: the standout track from Kid A for me; the guitar riff lifts you up and shakes you round, and there are multiple layers typical of a Radiohead masterpiece.
• Dave Matthews Band - Best Of What's Around: every couple has "their song". I think this is the one Kim and I consider to be ours, for nothing more complicated than the fact that we relate to the positive message of the lyrics. We got it pretty good and we appreciate that.
• Bentley Rhythm Ace - Bentley's Gonna Sort You Out: I remember seeing these guys live New Year's Eve 1998 at the Falls Festival in Lorne. The energy and the vibe was entrancing and made for one memorable NYE. Oh, and that pretty blonde thing that seduced me might have been part of it too, but we don't talk about that in front of the wife (it was before we met, ok??)
• Rakim - Lyrics of Fury: the angry and arrogant rapper lead the way for my forage into hip hop and R&B. Why does music that teeters between bragging about one's pay packet, dodging bullets and promiscuous sex sound so damn good? Yeah, it's the 'R', baby!
• Smashing Pumpkins - Mayonaise: when I was at university and first discovering live music, this was the band that made the biggest impression on me. The bass on this track from Siamese Dream squeals and moans in a way that the instrument was not intended, and the wallowing self-pity in the lyrics resonated with my teenage angst perfectly. I had become a fan.

Five people to whom I am passing the baton (ooh ooh, can I have six? Can I?):

Building on Cameron's list of Aussie geeks (an Oz-pack to rival the Brits?) I'm going to list a couple of mates as well as use this as an intro to some folks whose sites I have been following but haven't actually touched base with before. G'day!

• Cameron Pegg - Melbourne lad who deserves a bloggy for "Best subtitle. Ever."
• Ben Bailey - another Melbourne-based designer who needs to come out of the basement and socialize with the standards-savvy crowd
• Justin French - Textdrive's man in Melbourne. Singled out because I need to know what music one listens to when having the balls to sign up for employment by a (albeit well-respected) startup company on the other side of the world run by people you've never met
• Michael Efford - Perth boy with a marvel for pixel massaging and a penchant for quality design-related linkage.
• Andrew Krespanis - Brisbane blogger with a beautiful site both on the surface and under the hood
• Lachlan Hunt - a Sydney-based markup nerd who is brave enough to include a photo of himself in a Firefox t-shirt on his site. Rock on dude!

Thanks Cam, was wondering what I was going to write about next.

Shortcutting The Design Process

For those who don't know me well, I have both technical and creative streaks. I studied computer systems engineering at university, but up until then I also spent a good deal of time drawing cartoons, sketching portraits and writing poetry to express myself. While this background often works well for me, especially considering both are required to be a good web designer, at times I find they tend to conflict with one another.

One example of this became obvious when trying to come up with a new design for this site.

I've spent a good chunk of yesterday and today messing around with new ideas, and each time I think I am making progress, I decide I am unhappy with what I've done and start over. It wan't until I took some time out this afternoon to take my mind off it that I realized why I wasn't getting anywhere: I've been trying to shortcut the process.

I would start out disciplined, by drawing a few pages of thumbnails and sketches and reworking ideas until I think they have potential to work up on the computer. It's at this point that I should spend more time in Photoshop, free of browser quirks and CSS syntax, to narrow down what I want to achieve and iron out all the detail.

But instead the right-brain semantic purist (and probably the impatient designer who wants to visually see some kind of result) steps in and insists that the HTML corresponding to the information I want to present be laid out logically before it is styled. Which is still ok, I guess. It's just that it's not the most creative step.

And then I try jumping to the finish line by writing my CSS directly. And that's when things falls apart.

It's not that my CSS isn't up to producing individual effects that I am after. It's pretty good these days, I can position things by writing floats and position: relatives and pretty much get the layout I'm after on the fly. But it still takes longer than it would to draw it in Photoshop. And it leaves out all the integral factors that go to making a good design:

• typography (often achieved with an image, due to the limitations of a web browser)


• a consistent colour scheme (yes it's easy to change the colours for multiple elements in a stylesheet, but I'm guilty of having only a rough idea and thinking "I'll tweak that later" while forgetting how difficult it is to visually adjust things while constantly flipping back to your browser and hitting reload)


• element relationships (essentially, the bigger picture of how different parts of the page connect to each other)

The last couple of lectures at design class have verbalised some of these concepts, such as the "CRAP" theory (contrast - repetition - alignment -proximity) and other similar ways of dissecting a layout, and all the while I've been listening intently, taking notes and finding it all very interesting, and then completely ignoring it all when "whipping up" a web page.

So maybe it's not that the left and right-side of my brains are competing with each other - perhaps it's just that I'm impatient. Well, no longer. It's back to drawing board, and no wavering on discipline! I think I'll document each step of the site redesign process here, it should be interesting.

Melbourne Web Standards Group Meeting

If you design or develop for the web and reside in or around Melbourne, you should come along to the next Web Standards Group meeting this Thursday evening. Meetings are fairly informal, there is usually quite a different mix of people (good networking opportunity!) and our presenter, Cameron Adams, is talking about a subject he knows like the back of his hand - Javascript.

Send RSVPs to melbourne [AT] webstandardsgroup.org.