As exchanging messages is the most important feature of an instant messaging client, we put a great deal of thought into the way the messages are displayed. As we have already explained, we decided to implement the Adium message style system. This system offers a great flexibility to message style authors to display the conversation content the way they want.
In order to give users a good out-of-the-box experience, we have packaged a variety of messages styles by default in Instantbird.
We care a lot about the stability of Instantbird. Again, the Mozilla platform has some great tools to help us here.
In the unfortunate event of a crash, a window apologizing for the interruption in your work flow will pop up, and suggest you send some anonymous information about this issue to our servers. We can then analyze it and fix it for a later version, to make Instantbird more stable for you.
This crash reporting system has already helped us a lot to improve the overall stability of Instantbird.
The preferences dialog is a new feature in Instantbird 0.2 which will feel familiar to Firefox users. The overall appearance is the same, making you feel at home.
Some tools you already have in Firefox can help you manage your conversations in Instantbird:
Trying to find where a topic or keyword was mentioned in a long conversation is a common action. Instantbird uses the same findbar as Firefox to provide a search facility inside conversations. Just press Ctrl + F (Command + F on Mac OS X) and the findbar will appear:
During the 0.2 cycle, we spent a lot of time reworking the conversation window. The conversation window will now feel more familiar to Firefox users. That’s because lots of parts have been borrowed and adapted. In this post, and the next few posts, we will present features that are already present in Firefox, but have been adapted for Instantbird.
Let’s begin with tabs: conversations appear in tabs that work exactly the same way as in Firefox 3.6.
As you may already know, Instantbird 0.2 will be released soon. The development of this version has been going on for more than a year already! While we have been busy adding new features or polishing existing ones, we may have missed a few opportunities to communicate about what we were doing, what we had already done, where we are going, and why. And when we did write something about our new features, the announcements lacked screenshots, and probably didn’t convey much of our enthusiasm.
The last few days before the 0.2 release are an opportunity for us make up for our lack of communication.
The last status update here was more than a month ago, so it’s probably time for another update. We are still working toward releasing Instantbird 0.2 in the near future.
At this point, the code of the application is ready. Two points are still holding the release though:
We look forward to putting Instantbird 0.2 in the hands of users who didn’t dare to try the beta releases.