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

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

Hi All,

Sorry for the long delay with posting an update, life gets a bit busy sometimes.
The SocialMail redevelopment is well underway here’s a summary of what I plan to release in the next few versions (no timeline as yet):
-New front panel showing a timeline of the contacts information (emails, tweets, etc) in chronological order
-Improving the display of all elements to be a bit crisper and more functional
-Context menu improvements
-replacing per network tabs with popup panels, cleaner look and less clutter
-A better way to attach contacts to social networks (this may have to wait until the 2nd new release)

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve pulled the SocialMail plugin from the Mozilla site. With some of the changes that have happened with one of the API providers, I decided that the current version was no longer publishable and so removed it. I will republish it once things are back on track.

In the mean time I will be publishing updates hear and hope to have a new Alpha out in a while for you all to play with.

-Daniel