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The new Thundertab has (partially) landed in the nightly builds of Thunderbird. You’ll need to get Lightning installed to see all this and it’s not too pretty yet, but we’re making lots of progress.
But there’s no time to lose! We’re already talking about how to handle tab session restore to keep all your opened mail tabs around for future sessions.
I’ve put up a partial mockup already, but it’s still early. As always please leave comments below!
Thunder-tab
I’ve been experimenting with how we can use tabs inside Thunderbird.
The previous tabbing post already discussed how tabs help people to keep their current context and multi-task more flexibly. I’ve created a number of designs that look into using tabs in Thunderbird so email users can have the same kind of power over their context.
In Tabs By Default
To keep your current context of email reading, searches will open up in a new tab by default. Such that anytime you’re in the All Mail tab and start a search the results will open in a new tab. Opening up the Calendar, Tasks, and Contacts will also open up by default in a new tab as well. Tabs will need to be fast to open.
Tab Shortcuts
Much like you could want quick bookmarks to open up the web pages that you access frequently Thunderbird needs a way for users to open up different types of tabs that are unique and used frequently.
Tab shortcuts allow us to offer a default set of tab locations that users may want to open. We can also offer this location up to extensions to enable them to add in their own shortcuts for items like CRMs, Thunderbrowse, and other elements that would want to be opened up in tabs.
With shortcuts we should also focus on some ideas for preventing people from opening up too many tabs of the same interface. Perhaps something that (on mouse over) shows you the other tabs of that type already opened.
New Tabs / Summary Views
Sometimes you just want a new tab to start fresh, there are lots of reasons to start a new tab. For this we have a new tab button that allows Thunderbird users to open a new, empty tab.
Upon opening a new tab Thunderbird could just show a blank page and focus the search bar. However it would probably make more sense to use the opportunity to open up a summary view page while the search bar is focused.
This summary page could use the widget system that Spicebird uses or just give a static summary of your mail, events, and tasks. Adding in items for recent searches could be good as well. Pulling information from places like whoisi about my contacts could be another interesting element to this summary page.
Progress
There’s still lots of work to be done and issues to understand; this design work isn’t finalized. For tracking the Thunderbird tab work that’s planned for Thunderbird 3, see bug 21899 where I’ll be posting more comments and designs. Comments on this blog are always appreciated as well.
How to steal from a Fox
Interface design is hard work, so it’s really nice when someone else has done much of the heavy lifting for you and left their labor open to cherry picking. :) The Mozilla platform has been getting a number of upgrades in large part due to the work of the Firefox team and thankfully I have no shame in stealing the work of our compatriots. Here’s how you can do it too.
What to Steal
I started in the Preferences area because we (TB & FF) share many of the same mechanisms used to change preferences. Also it’s difficult to get preferences done right so it’s nice to be able to take all the hard work someone else did there and make it our own.
In Bug 451620 — “Remove the Advanced Preference for Connection timeout” we are cleaning up a preference mostly used for debugging and therefore doesn’t really belong in the main interface. While working on the patch I took a look at FIrefox’s preferences to see what they were doing in that area and noticed they have the exact same preference, but it looked cleaner and nicer. So I took it. 
In Bug 452711 — “Use firefox default font chooser for display” I wanted to improve a users ability to change their font preferences. Currently Thunderbird requires a user to change fonts with the daunting font dialog now available from the Advanced button. In making this patch I went straight over to the Firefox font preferences and ported it over to our code. Again, I have no shame about taking this either.
How You Can Steal Too!
Stealing code for preferences is easy, so easy, that I (not a programmer) can do this in a fairly short amount of time. It only takes a reasonable knowledge of HTML/XML (XUL can help) and Javascript.
There are lots of this kind of preferences work to be done and it’s a great way for a new person who wants to submit a patch into the codebase to get a sense of the process.
Here’s a step by step on how I’ve been borrowing their code such that anyone should be able to do it.
Step 1 - Source Code
Get the source code from steps in the Comm-Central source code wiki page. This step takes a little while as it downloads all the necessary components to build Thunderbird.
Step 2 - Initial Build
Build Thunderbird initially, you should only need to build it entirely once. Follow the steps to create your .mozconfig or you could just try mine, which gives you a debug build.
export MOZCONFIG=~/tbsrc/comm-central/mozilla/browser/config/mozconfig . $topsrcdir/mozilla/browser/config/mozconfig mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/tbird-debug mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail,calendar ac_add_options --enable-application=mail ac_add_options --disable-optimize ac_add_options --enable-debug
Then run the build command as they describe. Now go get some coffee or something.
Step 3 - Start Stealing
Time to start stealing! Move into the Mail Preferences code and open up one of the files (check out Prime Places to Steal for ideas).
(from src) cd mail/components/preferences/
Then at the same time go into the Firefox preferences and open up the preferences file that has the component pieces you’re looking to steal.
(from src) cd mozilla/browser/components/preferences/
Step 4 - Building Your Theft
Now as you viciously swap pieces from the Firefox preferences over to Thunderbird preferences you don’t need to rebuild the entire Thunderbird source code, just the preferences component you’re changing.
Move into the preferences component on the build directory. (this assumes you have a tbird-debug directory, which you’d get if you used my .mozconfig file) There should only be a Makefile in this directory so type “make” and it will build up the preferences component.
(from src) cd tbird-debug/mail/components/preferences make
If you were to change any of the strings (preferences DTD files) used in the DTD that the XUL file references then you’ll need to rebuild the locales jar, which is just as easy.
(from src) cd tbird-debug/mail/locales make
Step 5 - Testing Your Theft
Now you’re ready to run your new version of Thunderbird! You’ll likely want to create a different profile than your normal profile.
(from src) ./tbird-debug/mozilla/dist/bin/thunderbird -P test
Common Gotchas I Encountered
Here are some common errors I hit that were annoying to work through.
Parse Error: If you add code with references to DTD entities ( often labels like “&colors.label” ) that don’t exist you’ll get a parse error that’s pretty difficult to understand. Check that your DTD has the correct entity ( <ENTITY colors.label “Colors:”> ) and that you’ve built the jar from the locales directory.
Adding New Files: If you’ve added new XUL and DTD files you’ll need to add references to those files in the “.mn” file. Don’t ask me why! I just work here. See the preferences jar.mn and the locales jar.mn files, the format is pretty obvious.
Prime Places to Steal
Bug 451599 — “Add preferences UI for disk cache size and clearing the cache“. To implement this bug you really just need to grab the Firefox Preference code from line 221 to line 233 and copy it just after line 216 of the Thunderbird Preferences code. You’ll need to poke around at the related Javascript code for hooking it up. And don’t forget to copy the strings from Firefox advanced.dtd file into the Thunderbird advanced.dtd file. See, no shame at all!
Another one is the continuation of Bug 452711 — “Use firefox default font chooser for display” where you can copy over the color chooser. First apply the patch provided in the bug. Copy the Firefox colors.xul file over to the Thunderbird preferences directory and the colors.dtd over to the Thunderbird preferences locale directory. Don’t forget to update both jar.mn files (and build the jars) as mentioned in the Gotchas section.
Then have a look at the code for the Firefox Content Preference and grab the row from line 195 to line 201, the button which launches the color chooser dialog. You’ll also need to grab the content.js configureColors function and add it to the display.js code. Don’t forget to change “chrome://browser/…” to “chrome://messenger/…”.
Making and Submitting Your Patch
Once you’ve made your changes and tested them out you’ll want to open a new bug, and upload your patch to that bug. Use the hg diff command to make your patch, I generally do something like this.
hg diff --git > ~/Desktop/stealing-ff-preferences.patch
Make sure the new bug is against Thunderbird Preferences, use this link to get the product/component entries correct, and attach your patch along with that new bug.
Don’t forget to CC me on that bug! Use my email: clarkbw at gnome . org
Legitimate Sharing
Stealing isn’t right. It’s not that we want to copy all this code, which can create known issues of code sharing. However I defend this especially for something like the preferences UI which goes under a considerable amount of churn each release; making it difficult to place those elements in a lower layer like toolkit for optimum sharing.
Once we’ve played catch up for a bit I hope that Thunderbird can start sharing code back as we create new improvements on the current systems.
A Cure For Real Estate Amnesia
Mr. Unger of The Unger Report has outdone himself this time.
“…Real Estate Amnesia (REA) is the leading cause of real estate anxiety, next to homelessness and foreclosure…” - A Cure For Real Estate Amnesia
What are Attachments?
Should links inside emails be considered attachments? In the technical sense of an email (like rfc 2183) links wouldn’t be considered a different content type. The question isn’t whether they are technically attachments as much as if they should be attachment-like in the user interface.
Facebook handles links in a message almost like an attachment-object and will do some additional meta work on the link to provide a default photo and short description for it.
In the message list view Facebook offers an icon to note that a link attachment was included in a messages.
In the composition view Facebook also grabs links from inside the message and shows them separately as an attachment like thing. In the screenshot below the composition window grabbed the link inside my message and pulled down a description and number of photos from the site.
link detected in the composition area
This kind of meta data around a link can be really beneficial. The presentation of the link is better than a person naturally would and since it’s the information is retrieved automatically it only takes extra seconds to make sure a good image and description appear.
Beyond just the benefits of better presentation is another hot topic in the Thunderbird world of offline support. When reading mails offline it’s far better to have a more context about the link than none at all. Even if I can’t bring up the link in an offline state the image, description and comment can help me to recall what the link is about.
Gmail
When you’re using the rich editor for composing a message in Gmail and create a link it has some nice features for recognizing a link and helping you edit it. Here are some screen shots of what Gmail is doing right now.
Popup indicates the link has been recognized in compose window
Editing a Link
Alternatively Editing an Email link
Pretty straightforward and simple stuff when compared to the extra things Facebook is doing. Gmail doesn’t add meta-data about the links or make their inclusion visible in the message list.
Links as Attachments
If in Thunderbird we wanted to start treating links more like we treat attachments…
Visual Field of Dreams
Not more baseball…
I’m wondering what is the optimum visual field or display size for reading on a computer screen?
I haven’t been able to find an easy answer to this question for a number of reasons and what I’ve found for research indicates many conflicting studies. One difficulty is that you have to really define what optimum means. Are you optimizing for speed, comprehension, or satisfaction? Also the size of the documents you are reading can change the optimizing factors for presenting it.
So here’s a compilation of research papers that I’ve found related to the Visual Field, Optimum Display Size, whatever you want to call it problem.
The Effects of Line Length on Children and Adults’ Online Reading Performance [ pdf ]
Adults were measured against children in 3 sets of line length for reading time and effective reading score yet no real differences were found. What is interesting is the perceived results, only in adults found the narrow to medium line length (45 - 76 CPL - characters per line) to be preferred when compared to the full length (132 CPL).
The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News [ pdf ]
Twenty college-age students were given news articles to read displaying in 35, 55, 75, or 95 characters per line from a computer monitor. The results showed that passages formatted with 95 cpl resulted in faster reading speed with no effects for comprehension or satisfaction other than strong preferences for sizes.
The Effect of display size on reading and manipulating electronic text [ pdf ]
An attempt at more meaningful analysis of the effect of window size on reader comprehension and manipulation of “real-world” texts. Participants were given journal articles for comprehension and a software manual for specific information. Indications that screen size does not play a major factor in performance on either task and readers prefer larger screens. (no kidding!)
Reading and skimming from computer screens and books: the paperless office revisited?
Previous research made conclusions from the screens of the 1980s vs. paper, however when comparing against high quality CRTs speed and comprehension are equivalent. However skimming on a CRT is still 41% slower than from a book, reasons for this finding are discussed.
Interface Design and Optimization of Reading of Continuous Text
A fantastic overview of a lot of different research that has taken place with breakdowns of key variable components of each experiment. If you only read one paper this is likely the best one to get a handle on the situation.
Cited in several other papers but I couldn’t track down an available source for this paper.
Please leave comments for other related research articles, I’d love to be able to find more information on this topic.
This is Dialog Invasion!!
Later today I’ll be giving a summit session on UX for Thunderbird. The Thunderbird Dialog Invasion is one of the many topics to cover.
<script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript"></script><noscript>digg this!</noscript>
All-Star Break
I arrived in Vancouver on Tuesday July 1st after my long adventure across the country. I think all the sun, baseball parks, and driving ran down my system so after my friends left and I got 2 days of work in I spent the weekend sleeping.
 Cleveland Indians |
 Detroit Tigers |
 Chicago White Sox |
 St. Louis Cardinals |
 Kansas City Royals |
 Colorado Rockies |
 Oakland A’s |
 Seattle Mariners |
Eight stadiums in all. An amazing trip, though some places were certainly missed due to timing. I would have loved to see a Cubs game in Chicago as well as a Giants game in San Francisco but the teams weren’t available when we were coming through. Next time.
Vancouver
Is a beautiful place. I seem to have brought nothing but perfect weather with me as everyday but one was sunny and warm. I quickly setup a Canadian SIN (which is similar to an American SSN), a local bank account and spent the last couple of weeks getting settled into to my international digs. I had already prearranged a stay in a temporary apartment which is working out well as it’s right in Yaletown and lets me easily explore the downtown area.
Vancouver has such a mix of different people. Everyday I hear people speaking in a number of different languages, Chinese, German, Russian, and Spanish to name a few I could recognize. Everyday on my walk to and from work I smell someone smoking weed somewhere. And everyday I hear the grinding and pounding noise of construction. Overall somewhat similar to summers in Cambridge.
Experimental Message View
Before I left the states we started work on something I called The Experimental Message View. I’ll post more about it later, but the simplistic goal is to create a new way of interacting with messages and with the required technology change enables others to easily create alternate experiments inside Thunderbird.
Andrew Sutherland has been cranking on the Global Database work with an initial preview, an m-1 trial release (download and install), and even an early visualization.
Paul Rouget has updated his work on the new treeview API which could help us implement richer message lists by changing how we display messages.
Things are coming together quickly.
Where’s Scotty when I need him?
This Scotty, not that Scotty. Yesterday andrew and I were interrupted at the office by a power outage that effected the entire city block around 11am. And again today when I got to the office it was still closed.
At least one downtown building told power will not be restored until 8:00 am Thursday - Latest info on downtown power, traffic, transit
That’s my office! Would have been useful news if they informed me which building it was before I made the trip downtown to find it closed and missed the status call. I still need to pickup a canadian cell phone and it would have been useful to arrive at work more than 5 minutes before the call.
Go West Young Man!
This Thursday I take permanent leave of Boston to make my new home in lovely Vancouver, BC. Boston has been my home for over 4 years now and after growing up in neighboring NH I honestly never thought I’d be back here this long.
Boston Skyline @ 4:45am by StarrGazr License: 
Though it won’t be the place I’ll miss, it’s my friends and I wish they were coming with me. I’ve tried to convince several of them to do that. Why can’t we all live in the same place?
On Tuesday my u-pack boxes arrived and I squeezed in all the possessions I hadn’t thrown out in the last couple weeks and feel are worth bringing across the country. I actually don’t have many of these things even though they add up quickly. On Friday Moose and I will have left Boston on a grand trip across the states.
Moose is too old to fly anymore, he might not even make this trip in the car, not really; he should be fine. But luckily I won’t be alone with a dog who farts a lot as two of my best friends and I are cramming into my little car to catch baseball games on the road as we make our way from one coast to the next. Thus our route isn’t a clear shot from one place to the next.
I will be partially online during the trip, uploading photos of baseball stadiums, cities, arches, and other parks along the way. I also want to keep up with all the changes we’ve got planned, Thunderbird is starting to make so much progress it would be crazy to take too much time off right now.
Vancouver skyline at night by istargazer License: 
Thanks to everyone I’ve met in Boston, all the friends I’ve made. Please come visit me in Vancouver.
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