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.

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.

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.

Smileys

People are used to see little images like in conversations instead of the plain text version :-). Testers of Instantbird 0.1.* have probably noticed that this feature was missing. No more.

Instantbird 0.2 supports smileys, and has a theme system for them. Creating a new smiley theme is easy: it is just a bunch of images and a file (JSON format) describing how to use them, bundled into an XPI file.

Message styles

Selecting a smiley theme is not enough for you to feel comfortable when looking at your conversations? Ok, we have more! We have borrowed the message style system of Adium to let you fully customize the way your conversations look.

An image is worth a thousand words so… I’m gonna give you a thousand of images. Ok, not really a thousand, but we took a few hundreds of screenshots to show how Instantbird is doing with the hundreds of Adium message styles downloadable from adiumxtra.com.

The compatibility is not perfect because there are some differences in the way Instantbird and Adium handle themes, and some Adium themes may use some webkit-specific features, but most themes look right.

This theme system is very flexible, and quite easy to learn. The technologies used (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) are well known by web-developers and web-designers. If you are not happy with the existing themes, go ahead an create your own. And don’t hesitate to let your creativity play with all the cool new developer features of Firefox 3.5.

Extensibility

The eye candy is cool but… I’m a developer, I want to create extensions and I want to be able to interact with the conversations! Don’t worry, we love you too. We added several new APIs for extension developers. It is now easy, for example, to change the way we filter incoming messages, modify the text before it is displayed (adding links for instance), and more coming!