Network Lighthouse

Thanks to Mozilla’s new philosophy of publishing new major releases every month or so, SocialMail has been a little behind the times for a little while.   However I am pleased to say that there is finally a new version which:

• Is Thunderbird 7 Compatible
• May work with Thunderbird 8, but not tested, I’ve just incremented the version compatibility as it should work
• Fixes some problems with international characters in contact’s names (Thanks to Frank who reported this)
• I can’t test this myself as I have no contacts with European names, so I’d appreciate any feedback

Thats it for the moment, I’ve been flat out with the day job, family stuff and other commitments, I’m just not getting much time for coding.  Hopefully that will change soon…

Get it here: socialmail-0.6.3b

-Daniel

I’ve finally gotten round to testing SocialMail with Thunderbird 6, and everything seems to work fine.

That said, I know a few people have tried making it work and met with mixed success.   So I’m doing the only thing I can think of, publish a fresh copy (which works for me on Linux) and see if it starts working for everyone else.   So could you please download this version: SocialMail0.6.2b (hosted on AMO)

EDIT: If you have trouble with the first link, try this instead: social_mail-0.6.2b (hosted here)

Let me know how it works for you and please post your Thunderbird version and OS so I can work out where the problem is if people are still having issues.

-Daniel

For those that have followed my development history for a while, you may remember rap4tb my first plugin for Thunderbird which provided some Social Network integration with Thunderbird.   It wasn’t a very glamorous piece however it was functional and had a fair (~100) number of users.

Unfortunately the data provider that was being used for that product (RapLeaf) changed directions and no longer provide the social network information that was being displayed (the same issue that affected SocialMail) and so rap4tb fell by the wayside as it had no further purpose in life.

…

A couple of months ago I was contacted by the people over at FullContact.com asking if I wanted to integrate their  contact  API into SocialMail.   While I think there is a future there it’s not something I wanted to jump at so instead I suggested that I release a seperate plugin which presents their data to users.   And since rap4tb no longer has a functioning purpose, does 90% of what I wanted the new plugin to do, I’ve retrofitted it to use the FullContact API and so “FullContact for Thunderbird”(FC4TB for short) was born.

For those that want to try it out, you can download it from AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/fullcontact-4-thunderbird/

Of course there is a catch, FullContact is a business and their product is the API service for which FC4TB relies on.  They have generously allowed new users to use the service free for a period of time after which it will stop working unless a license is purchased.   The precise method and amount are still being worked out, so stay tuned.

-Daniel

After a little digging around I’ve been able to get to the bottom of the conflict between SocialMail and the new Conversations plugin.   It turns out that as Conversation replaces the message view pane in thunderbird, it clobbers a number of events that other plugins may be using.    In my case it was the “MsgMsgDisplayed” event which triggered when a new message was rendered.

Fortunately the authors of Conversations took this into account and provided another hook to enable plugins like SocialMail to interact with it.  Here are the details for anyone that is interested http://blog.xulforum.org/index.php?post/2010/11/27/Thunderbird-Conversations-plugins

With that done, here is a new version of SocialMail, now compatible with Thunderbird Conversations!   SocialMail_0_61

-Daniel

After far too long, I am happy to release a new ‘preview’ version of SocialMail.

This release is considerably reworked from the previous versions, here are a few of the highlights:

• Thunderbird 5 compatibility (not as easy as it sounds), while retaining Thunderbird 3
• A new front tab, showing a timeline of communications from the selected contact.  At the moment this only includes emails at twitter tweets, but there will be more to come.
• A much more functional context menu system
• Attachment lists should be much more complete, gathering information from the internal Gloda database

Please keep in mind that this is a ‘preview’ release (pre-beta),  it hasn’t been tested thoroughly and I accept no responsibility for any problems that it causes

To try out the new version, click on the following link, save it and install into Thuderbird in the usual manner:  SocialMail v0.6

Finally please post your experience, if something doesn’t work as expected let me know, and share your thoughts on the new timeline panel.

-Daniel