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:
Tag Archives: 0.2
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.
Our goals: toward Instantbird 0.2 and beyond
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 way toward Instantbird 1.0
Let’s begin with a clarification about the way we are slowly but surely going to our future 1.0 release. Our initial roadmap contained the somewhat misleading claim that our goal for 1.0 was to reach “feature parity” with Pidgin. This led some people to believe that we were basically copying the Pidgin graphical user interface and reimplementing it in XUL. Although this could have held some truth for the earlier goal of Instantbird - which was to provide the extensibility that is loved in Firefox and features similar to those found in Pidgin - this is no longer the case.
When we implement a new feature in Instantbird, we carefully consider how it is likely to be used. We think about the use cases. We look at how the same problem has been handled by other existing IM clients, so that we can benefit from what others have done before us. Sometimes we take inspiration and implement something in a similar way to another client (for instance the message theme system that we have borrowed from Adium), but sometimes things don’t look satisfying and we have to look for a better solution. We especially try to avoid exposing the user to new popup dialogs that interrupt the user but don’t seem absolutely necessary.
Once something is implemented, we do our best to take advantage of the early feedback we get from our nightly testers.
So why are we doing this? Copying the interface of an existing application as quickly as possible would be easier, and would lead to a fast result. But it would be worthless. We don’t need another Pidgin, Adium, … (insert the name of your favorite multi-protocol IM application here). These applications already exist and are mostly great, there’s no point in cloning them. What we do care about is our users: our current users of course, but also future users. We believe instant messaging should be less frustrating. We want to build an all-in-one instant messaging application that is as easy as possible to use, yet powerful. We value simplicity and ease of use in the default configuration, and at the same time we want to allow advanced customizations. Developers with an idea should be able to easily customize their IM client, like they can already do with their web browser.
We value privacy, and respect your data. Instant messages often have confidential or intimate content. We believe that our users should have the power to decide how this information is used, and where it is stored. This is the reason why even though more and more users decide to use web applications like Gmail, Facebook or Meebo for their IM needs, we believe that it is still relevant in 2010 to build an IM application that runs directly on the computer you own.
We don’t know yet how Instantbird 1.0 will be, it will need to be discussed. With You. At this point we are discussing which improvements will compose the 0.3 release. If you want to take part in this discussion or have questions related to our long term goals, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
What’s next?
We are confident that if you have tried a release from the Instantbird 0.1.* series, you will see Instantbird 0.2 as major improvement. And if you haven’t used Instantbird before, then the 0.2 release is a great time to start! In the next few days, we will detail a few of the features that already make Instantbird 0.2 a very usable instant messaging application, despite its low version number.
Status Update - Why 0.2 is not out yet
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 have to rework the server side part of our update system, because the scripts we used on the server up to version 0.2b2 of Instantbird were not able to handle updates in several languages. We want to be sure that users who downloaded Instantbird 0.2 beta 2 in a non-English language will receive an updated version in the same language.
- we are redesigning the main website of Instantbird. The goal of this redesign is partly to provide a visual refresh, but also to clarify the message. We are de-emphasizing the “multi-platform” argument (it is probably irrelevant to most users and is probably quickly understood by those who care about using Instantbird on more than one operating system), and we try to emphasis the simplicity and ease of use of Instantbird.
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 released in 4 languages!
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.
Instantbird 0.2 beta 1 released!
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.
Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 and addons!
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:
- It is ready to be localized (and you can try an experimental French language pack),
- Improved conversations: you can change conversation styles, smiley themes are now handled.
- We implemented a ‘magic’ copy/paste feature that will allow you to have pretty quotes out of messages copied from Instantbird. Some bugs may still exist in this.
- As usual, we took great care of stability issues, so Instantbird 0.2 alpha 1 is already more stable than 0.1.3.1 at this point, so don’t hesitate to give it a try!
You can download the alpha and read the release notes from here.