Message Styles
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.
Bubbles
In Instantbird 0.1.*, the display of conversations was very simple (some may say boring!), and very similar to what Pidgin does. In Instantbird 0.2, the default message style, called "Bubbles," is a lot more colorful.
Messages are displayed in colored bubbles. In a private conversation with one other user, there's a background color for your messages, and a color for the messages you receive. In multi-user chat rooms, there's a different color for each participant, so you easily can tell which messages are sent by the same participant:
In this theme, the display of messages is clear and well spaced out. This theme was designed to be usable for most users.
A few special features have been added to this theme to improve the readability of conversations and reduce the waste of space: consecutive messages from the same person are grouped automatically, consecutive system messages are automatically grouped and collapsed, and the timestamps are no longer displayed for each message, but as a tooltip when a message is hovered.
Because we know one theme cannot fit the needs of everybody, we provide a few other themes by default.
Dark
The "Dark" theme is designed to please people who like having a dark (almost black) background color in their windows.
Paper Sheets
The "Paper Sheets" theme is a less fancy alternative to the default Bubble theme.
Most of the features of Bubbles are also there, but it takes less space on the screen (no bubbles), and the colors are lighter.
The margins used in this theme automatically adapt based on the total size of the conversation area, in order to save space if you decide to use a very small conversation window.
Simple
As we know some people may feel nostalgic, hate fancy stuff, or simply want to have a very compact message theme, we have included a message theme called "Simple." With this theme, all the space is used for the conversation messages.
Finally, a little reminder about extensibility: even though the themes included by default have been designed to fit the needs of most users, they may not fit perfectly your personal taste, and that's why there are hundreds of message themes already available for you to enjoy trying out. Creating a new one yourself is also very easy.
Stability
We care a lot about the stability of Instantbird. Again, the Mozilla platform has some great tools to help us here.
Crash Reporting
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.
Crash detection and protection
In previous releases, the worst stability problem that occurred was a crash during start up (while automatically connecting accounts). This was very annoying since it was not possible to use the graphical user interface to change the configuration of the accounts likely to be related to the crash.
In Instantbird 0.2, we have addressed this issue by detecting if the last connection attempt finished correctly, that is, without the application being quit unexpectedly.
Start up crashes are very rare and you will most likely never run into one, but if it does occur to you: don't worry! At the next start up, you will see the account manager pop up with a message explaining the situation and inviting you to either retry connecting or edit the configuration of your accounts:
If the crash occurred after you added an account or changed the configuration of an account, this account will be the only one that won't connect at the next startup, and the message in the account manager will look like this:
Updates
When we identify the cause of common crashes, or when a serious issue is discovered (for example, an IM network no longer works), we try to quickly release a new minor version including a fix for the issue.
Instantbird will periodically check for updates and notify you automatically if a newer version is available. If you accept the update, it will then be downloaded automatically and applied during the next start up.
If you expect a new version, you can also force Instantbird to check now for an updates, using the "Check for updates" menu item:
Nightly builds
People who want to very closely follow the development of Instantbird can decide to receive the latest development version daily through this update system. We call these versions the "nightly builds." These builds are produced automatically every day so that new issues can be detected early on, before they creep up into release builds.
Feel free to use them, but watch out! They may not be stable, and if you decide to use them, you are expected to do so to help us test the bleeding edge features, not just be a cool kid who's got the new toy first. So if there are bugs, please report them (Filing a bug: what a bug report should contain) instead of complaining.
Preferences dialog
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 of the options are also the same...
... while some are very specific to Instantbird:
Conversation tools
Some tools you already have in Firefox can help you manage your conversations in Instantbird:
Find
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:
However, when looking for something in a conversation, the most recent match is probably the most interesting. That's why for Instantbird we adapted the findbar to search from bottom to top by default.
Zoom
Having trouble reading the text in conversations or fitting all the content on a small screen? Then the zoom feature is for you.
The keyboard shortcuts are the same as in Firefox: Ctrl + + to increase the size, Ctrl + - to decrease, and Ctrl + 0 to reset to the default size (Command instead of Ctrl on Mac OS X).
The changes in zoom settings are applied to all conversations at once and saved so that you do not need to adapt the zoom more than once.
Tabs
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.
Tab sizing
Tabs are sized to take full advantage of the available space: when there are only a few tabs, their width allows seeing most of the title of the conversations, and a close button is visible on each tab, making it easy to close a tab with a single click.
If there are more tabs or if the window is smaller, the tabs shrink, and the close button remains visible only on the selected tab to save space.
If the space is really too limited to fit all the conversation tabs, the tab bar becomes scrollable and a button appears to give the user a way to display a list of all tabs at once.
All this makes very small conversation windows usable.
Drag and drop
Tabs can be easily reordered, just drag a tab and drop it where you wish it to be.
Dropping a tab elsewhere detaches the tab to create a new window. The new window appears where the tab was dropped.
Tabs can also be dragged between windows:
OS integration
On Mac OS X, the active conversation window is easy to distinguish from the others, thanks to different colors of the tabs.
