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.
Instantbird 0.2 beta 2 is now available in English, French, Polish and Russian. If you want to help with the translation for another language, contact us.
The new features of this second beta include a better handling of statuses, cool new default message and emoticon themes, a basic log viewer, actions on buddies from a buddy list context menu, and a lot more! Read the release notes for the details.
Windows users will be pleased to notice that this release is provided with an installer.
You can download the beta and read the release notes from here.
The development of Instantbird 0.2 is nearly finished and this beta will be the last one before the final 0.2 release which is expected to come relatively soon.
We have been contacted by lots of individuals who volunteered to translate Instantbird into their native language and were eager to start working on it. As we were not ready to host the translations, we asked people to wait before starting their work on localized versions of Instantbird.
As we plan to release the next beta of Instantbird 0.2 in several languages, we feel that now is a good time to start translating the UI of Instantbird. Please note that the development work is not finished yet, and that there will still be string changes before we are ready to release this next milestone.
You will find information on the translation process on our wiki at http://wiki.instantbird.org/Instantbird:Translation. As usual, if you have any question, feel free to ask them in #instantbird on irc.mozilla.org or to contact us at contact AT instantbird DOT org.
We are happy to announce the release of Instantbird 0.2 beta 1. The two most significant improvements in this release are new tabs in conversation windows and the preferences window. There’s a lot more new stuff, read the release notes for a more detailed list.
You can download the beta and read the release notes from here.
Today is a very special day for us. We have a double release to announce!
First, the long awaited add-ons website is now ready for you to use. You will already find a lot of extensions on it since we took care of uploading more than 200 of them. Think about browsing the experimental add-ons, a lot of them are still marked as such. The add-ons website is at this address: https://addons.instantbird.org/.
And last, but not least, Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 is now ready for you to try it! There’s a lot of new interesting stuff in this one. Here are some of them, read the release notes for more:
You can download the alpha and read the release notes from here.