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

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

Development has been slow recently,  with a new job, a trip to London and moving house I haven’t had much time to work on SocialMail.

Hopefully now that things are starting to settle down I can get focussed on taking SocialMail further.  I really would like to get some community input as I don’t want to waste my time developing features that are of no interest to the users.

At the moment my thoughts are (in know particular order):

• More Integrations with social networks, I am seriously considering the OpenSocial based sites as I can cover multiple sites with minimal additional code.
• A user interface rework, scrapping the sidepanel and making socialmail more integrated into the Thunderbird interface.  For example, moving the profile picture into the header bar of the preview pane.
• Changing the API model so that new users don’t need to acquire their own rapleaf api key (discussed below)

The last one is likely to be the most contreversial but I think will have the greatest impact in terms of enabling new users to use SocialMail.  At present I have between 10-20 downloads per day, not to shabby, however this isn’t translating into new users well, as I am only seeing slight growth week on week.  I am of the belief that part of the reason is that users can’t be bothered with getting their own RapLeaf key, which takes a day or two depending on how busy they are.

What I’d like to do is pre-provision SocialMail with the ability to work out of the box, no need to register to get at least a few api calls a day.   At present I am talking to RapLeaf to work out exactly how this can be acheived and hope to come up with a workable solution and hope to come up with something in a few days.

Outside of those ideas, are there any suggestions on what people would like to see from SocialMail, just keep in mind, if it’s a request to integrate with another socialnetwork/site then an existing public API is a must,  I aim to keep clear of private APIs and will not write code for scraping content directly from sites.

-Daniel

It’s been a few weeks since SocialMail 0.13 was released and I’ve been busy in the mean time.   If you’ve read my last few posts you’ll know that the interface as been redone to allow a lot more information to be displayed while keeping the most recent details up front.

The interface has been converted to a tab based layout which allows us to have different screen areas for each information source, while allowing the front tab, to show the latest details from each section (user configurable).

SocialMail v0.2 also includes the first cut of twitter functionality, which once enabled adds a new tab which show the last 10 or so (configurable) tweets from whoever you’re viewing.   Users can now ‘tweet’ directly from Thunderbird with the new ‘Update Status’ functionality which will ultimately allow sending updates to multiple micro-blogging sites (twitter, myspace, facebook, linkedin, etc) as modules for those sites are added.

All  in all, a lot has gone into this SocialMail update, which is why it’s taken longer than anticipated, so I hope you all enjoy it and look forward to hearing your experiences with it.

So here it is: SocialMailv0.2.1

(NOTE: This is a small update to address 2 isssues raised by Larry)

Have Fun,

Daniel

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted an update on SocialMail so I figure it time to let everyone know what I’ve been working on.

One of the issues with the current release is that there is to much information to fit in the sidepanel.  If you have a contact that has data in each of the boxes then it forces the thunderbird window to expand, in my case (and I’m sure many others) this means off the end of the screen.    This issue is set to become much worse as I add functionality and new datasources.  To resolve this the interfaces has been reworked to use tabs to seperate the key parts, while keeping the most recent information on the first tab for easy access/reference.

Switching to a tab based layout has made things a lot clearer and will help with the integration of new data sources,  each of which can now have it’s own space to render as it needs.   Extra elements can be added as modules, without have to mess with the main code, so it will be theoretically possible for others to write SocialMail modules to extend it with specific extensions (much like SocialMail extends Thunderbird).

Twitter integration is now also well underway, with tweets being automatically displayed when you view an email from a contact who uses twitter.   Functionality to be able to post (re)tweets/direct messages/etc isn’t in yet, but thanks to the guys who wrote twitterHelper.jsm, shouldn’t take to long.

One last thing, for anyone familiar with the workings of XUL.   When I have a listbox which has the listcell-iconic style applied to it’s listitems, they aren’t selectable.  Why is that and how do I fix it?

Update: In answer to my own question, the issue is because I should have been using a listitem-iconic style not listcell-iconic.  The listcell styles don’t support selection since you typically want to select the whole item not just one cell.

-Daniel