In order to ease the migration for current Thunderbird 2 users to Thunderbird 3, Blake, Bryan and myself have been working on a migration assistant that we plan to ship in the upcoming 3.1
Before we merge it in we need your help to run it and try it out.
Please leave feedback on GetSatisfaction or in the comments.
See Blake’s blog post for more info.
Now just add a system tray for thunderbird oob
How many times have you done the IE8 twenty-questions wizard when you install it? The whole thing is completely useless, asking questions about a product they haven’t used yet, about settings they have no understanding of because they haven’t been able to use them yet (e.g. Accelerators) and defaulting to asking the user instead of doing the best thing by default (Updating search engine plugins automatically).
Scrap this entire thing, do the right thing for the user by default and provide the ability customise.
This wizard does nothing but make the user’s relationship with Thunderbird daunting.
Present them with the new UI and provide a tour feature to explain the changes. The tour can then ask questions about preferences. Highlight the toolbar, explain the change, provide the option to say “No thanks, I preferred the older bar”.
DON’T do a start up wizard. I will stop switching users to Thunderbird if, like IE8, I have to go through this crap 100s of times a month.
Looks great. The only remark I have is that the second dialog (disk space) fails to mention what impact the different options will have on the disk space usage.
Sorry, I don’t use thunderbird, so I won’t install + try out, but a couple of things struck me. Firstly, in the collapsed headers box, you’re “treamlining” an experience. But more importantly, you should probably say something like “… so if you want to have the compact headers in your install, you need to install the CompactHeader extension” or something. Obviously the same applies to the extra folder columns page.
Looking at the synchronize box, I presume this uses up more disk space, hence the current disk space meter etc. But you don’t actually say so! Maybe it’s possible to estimate how much extra space would be used?
I hope these bits from the peanut gallery are useful instead of irritating…
I agree with Kroc Camen!
Use the first time start page to inform of the new features and where/how they can be changed. You are only confusing the users when asking them about things they have no way of knowing what is.
And by the way, the page should also inform about the Smart folders. In the Danish support forum we have had quite a few users that are very confused about getting mails in several folders.
Kim: We switched back to All Folders by default in Thunderbird 3.1
(dude, is no one actually trying out the actual builds? :/ )
Great that you switched back to All Folders!
I hope you will reconsider the Migration Assistant, even though I know that it will be a tough decision since you have been working so hard on it.
Sorry for not using nightlies or betas. I’m on holiday with a netbook that is not useful for experimenting
Hmm this is certainly better than the “text only” page 3.0 presented but I really wonder how many 2.x users have not switched to 3.0 already? E.g. how many will still see this wizard?
Michael: according to our numbers, quite a good bunch. We haven’t done any upgrade via the built in update system yet (like we do with the minor updates), so people have to actively seek out and download Thunderbird 3 for now.