Been working on the appearance of Thunderbird for the last two months now and as things are starting to land in the Nightly builds, things are indeed starting to look quite nice. As always, Lapo have been of great help in the icon department.
I’ve always enjoyed Thunderbird and it’s predecessors that have been following me since I started out with web stuff when I was around 14 years old. Therefore, working on this would really scratch my own itch as I felt it always looked out of place on my Linux desktop and allow me to give back to the e-mail client that served me with so many messages over the years (and pay the rent, yay!).
Anyway, here are some shots:
Main window:
Compose:
Address book:
As you might note, the icons in the main toolbar pretty much look the same, this is mainly because they are going away as soon as the great work that’s been going on with the new toolbar layout lands.
As we’ve used GTK+ stock items wherever we can, your folders in the sidebar will of course look native. Comparison between regular GNOME, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu:
Please check out a Nightly build and report any issues.
Looks great!
Seems that the GTK style looks a lot better as well.
Impressive work
.
@Hylke: treeviews don’t look perfect, they don’t get styled when a row selected. They use selected bg color, but not a gradient/or so.
But does it work with gnome-globalmenu? Firefox and OpenOffice don’t, so I try to use Epiphany and AbiWord whenever possible. Gotta work with the menu bar.
Great stuff.
WOW! I don’t believe it! It is so beautiful!
I love how the sidebar looks now. Very iTunes 8 style =) Love it!!!
ethana2: what is gnome-globalmenu?
Great work, I may have to try out TB again. Version 3 looks like it’s shaping up nicely!
I think gnome-globalmenu is one of those projects that moves windows’ menubars to the top of the screen like in Mac OS; I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
Overall I love this visual refresh but there are things I also hate, like the stamp icon for sending mails.
nicu: the alternative was envelope+arrow, and I think we use our fair share of envelopes in Thunderbird already. Arrows, well, you know how arrows are, you use them when you can’t come up with anything better.
Great work. Stuff like this makes TB a much better option.
Looks great! I’ve been using claws-mail on Linux for quite a while now, but I think there’s a good chance I’ll switch (back) to tb once v3 is released. I use tb on MacOS, and it’s much nicer to have a familiar interface across platforms.
To be quite frank, it looks almost the same as Thunderbird 2.x.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, though.
Andreas,
Nice improvement. However, I use the Penelope 5a1 extension. The icon set is very attractive for me — an x-Eudora user. Anything that would fix the address book would be a real plus.
The tab bar has to be true GTK tabs not those horrible FF2 style tabs.
Looks beautiful!
+1 for changing the send icon from a postage stamp to a nice big arrow.
I suppose this is part of a bigger issue with KDE and GTK, but have you tried it out in Kubuntu or another KDE4 environment?
Looks eerily similar to what I’m using now…
thanks so much for tackling this. i agree, tb 2 and under looked hideous on linux, so much so that even while i loved tb i avoided using it.
apparently some people didn’t notice this but in any case the rest of us are in you debt!
Hey! Check it out! It’s looking closer to and almost as good as the windows version! Now do Linux!
It still looks like a program from 1998. It’s going to take more than a few slightly more colorful icons to make this old pig look attractive. You should have waited to post a bigger improvement than this. That’s being honest, unlike the ass kissing zealots who are preprogrammed to give you praise.
Sorry to say.. but the font difference between address tabs and the main mail text was too much.. the main email text was too big.
A lot of linux GUI apps do the same mistake.. the fonts are not pleasant to view cause their sizes are all screwed up and it’s not possible to fix app by app. Hope someone pays attention to these details and gives us a consistent and not jarring visual display when it comes to linux apps. BTW, i’ve been using linux since 1996 and i am not cribbing cause i just recently started using it.
thanks and regards
Didn’t finish what i was ranting about.. cause of all this.. i’ve stopped using evolution and thunderbird and resorted to gmail cause I can use it anywhere and i don’t have to worry about ugly/big fonts etc.. and it provides much better search and features.
How do you set the dpi for the fonts in Thunderbird?
This made me finally release my theme
http://tangoproject.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/tango-gnome-thunderbird-tango-apps/
[...] Thunderbird visual refresh on Linux If you want to see screenshots of what Thunderbird would be like, then check out this blog entry. You would see a refreshing look on Thunderbird. I haven’t used it in ages so this is more of a new thing for me. I am glad people are working on this. Hopefully more will appreciate and use Thunderbird not just for its features but also because it looks sleek and it looks like it’s easy to use too. Share and Enjoy: [...]
Looks much better than current. So this will be included in the first TB3 release? That would be great.
[...] builds, things are indeed starting to look quite nice.Link:http://www.andreasn.se/blog/?p=98 Leave a comment Powered by LiveJournal.comAdvertisement Customize if (SnapShots) {SnapShots.init(’livejournal.com’, ‘livejournal.ru’, ’sol-agency.ru’, ‘last.fm’, ‘lastfm.com’, ‘lastfm.ru’, ‘livejournalinc.com’, ’sol.adbureau.net’, ‘ad.doubleclick.net’); } [...]
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We will be able to test the snapshots when amd64 builds will be made available…
Ummm I sure as hell hope this isn’t officially incorporated into Thunderbird. The Linux version already looks good, slick, polished. Your interface looks like it was designed 5 or 6 years ago, looks bland and boring. For linux to move forward and take it’s place among other OS’ we must take into account the visual aesthetic. Yours being distributed to or even seen by by the general public would be detrimental to that cause. Lets please make sure this design doesn’t see the light of day in any present or future distribution of a Linux version of a great Mozilla product
[...] [...]
I don’t know whether it’s the right place for that thing but I just write it down:
Try selecting an italic font in the Gnome Appearance Settings. Then all the GTK applications will use this italic font while Firefox and Thunderbird will use the non-italic version of the font.
[...] [...]
The design doesn’t really matter to me so long as the software is stable, I have had so many issues with Thunderbird on both windows and linux.
I like the icons a lot. It’d be nice if you could do a few icons for Enigmail, they always seem to look out of place for me.
Looks very neat! Too bad that most people won’t need it. Everybody uses webmail these days.
@Andreas Nilsson: gnome-global-menu is an applet that move an app’s menu bar into the GNOME panel. The panel displays the menu bar for the currently focused app, OS X style. See http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/
A mi mamá le gusta el pico greets Peter