Random pixels

Friends of the Tree website mockup

Andreas Nilsson — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:34:28 +0000

Every week during the Thunderbird Status Meeting we reward a contributor who have been doing great work on the app recently. A Friend of the Tree.
They get a honorable mention during the call and a sweet t-shirt in the mail, but I feel that’s not enough.
We should put them in the Hall of Fame in 1 mile high LED letters, seen from miles away and stories should be told about them for generations to come. After all, they made a great contribution that will benefit millions of users, all during their spare time!
I’ve put together a mockup of a site that could be fed with a simple rss feed and want some feedback.

svg source

Is it too cute or too little cute? Is it a good idea to begin with? Are there other ways we could highlight our contributors?

Two cool Linux addons for Thunderbird

Andreas Nilsson — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:57:34 +0000

Came across two nice addons of late that makes Thunderbird love your Linux system recently.

The first one is the Evolution Mirror extension that makes the appointments and tasks you create in Lightning show up in the GNOME clock applet.

The second is libnotify-mozilla by Ruben Verweij that allows Thunderbird to make use of Ubuntu’s Indicator Applet.

Windows Aero UI for Thunderbird

Andreas Nilsson — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:50:11 +0000

I’ve been working together with Richard Marti of late on bug 569400 to implement Aero glass for the Windows version of Thunderbird, similar to what the Firefox devs are doing for their 4.0 release. This makes things look a lot sweeter, and blend in better with Windows 7.
Since there are several parts and widgets getting touched and that it therefore needs a lot of testing and feedback before we unleash it to the majority of our users, we decided to implement it as a theme before doing any patches for core.

Here is where I need your help. If you’re a Thunderbird user on Windows, download the xpi and take it for a test spin. You’ll need version 3.2 of Thunderbird on order for things to work correctly. Get a nightly build here.
Leave feedback here or on the bug!

Give a talk at FSCONS

Andreas Nilsson — Fri, 28 May 2010 14:34:27 +0000

The Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) is being held for the forth time this November here in Gothenburg. The previous years have been really great, with lots of cool participants and and great talks.
This year seems really promising, with a 3d printer that can pretty much build a copy of itself among other things.
Now the organizers are looking for speakers, and it’s time for you to submit your really sweet talk on the amazing thing you’re working on.
They are especially interested in talks around the following subjects: Embedded systems, Infrastructure Monitoring, Makers of the Future, Net Neutrality and Openness, Ethics

Read more here, and don’t wait too long with your proposal!

GNOME 3 video website

Andreas Nilsson — Sat, 08 May 2010 22:31:40 +0000

Currently in the City of Zaragoza, Spain and we’ve had a great time at the GNOME Marketing Hackfest this week.
The focus have been on the upcoming GNOME 3 release this September and I’ve spent most of the time coming up with materials that GNOME fans across the world can use at conferences and LUG’s when spreading the word about the upcoming release.

One thing we want to do in the following weeks is to put together a website with videos showing the new great things such as the new user experience that the shell is offering and other cool stuff as collaboration features with gedit and Tomboy Online among other things. We also want some basic info about the release with a quick FAQ etc.
In it’s initial state, the website will just show a few videos, but will expand as people put together more videos with their favorite things about GNOME 3.

I’ve put together some mockups of how it could look, and if you’re a web developer with skills to put together things such as microblog feeds, photo feeds etc. and want to help with this, please let me know. Any help with this from people who know what they are doing is highly appreciated.

For more mockups and details, see the wiki page.

Many thanks for our sponsors this weeks: Zaragoza Municipality, Aragon Regional Government, Technological Institute of Aragon (ITA), ASOLIF, CESLA and the GNOME Foundation of course!

Hacking furniture

Andreas Nilsson — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:42:14 +0000

The cat litter box in the hall being the first thing you see when you enter our apartment always bugged us, so we decided to do something about it. We bought a cabinet at a flee market for 20 SEK (about $3 USD). Took it home, made sure the litter box fitted inside it and measured out a hole in the side. Then we used one of these guys to prepare a small hole to fit the jigsaw, sawed up the big hole and used an rasp and sandpaper to finish it up.

The cats seems to think it’s ok.

Thunderbird Migration Assistant

Andreas Nilsson — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:54:02 +0000

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.

Windows | Mac OS X | Linux

Please leave feedback on GetSatisfaction or in the comments.

See Blake’s blog post for more info.

Opening the GNOME Store

Andreas Nilsson — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:22:10 +0000

[disclaimer, today the Internet sucks, but I'm going to pretend it's not April 1st, because I wanted this blog post out today, so sorry, no pranks in this post]

GNOME 2.30 was released yesterday. Lots of neat stuff in this release such as neater looking games (thanks to Clutter), support for Iphones (without any need for jailbreaking), better Tomboy notes sync, easier to set up Facebook chat in Empathy etc.

With the 2.30 release, we’re also opening the GNOME Store, where you can get yourself GNOME t-shirts and other gear. Been working on and off on this for quite a while now, so it’s nice to officially declare it as done!
The store currently sports 7 t-shirts and two mugs, but we’re gradually going to expand it and are looking for more sweet designs.

To celebrate the 2.30 release, we’re going to have some beers tonight at Gnutiken in Gothenburg around 18.00. Be there!

Robots

Andreas Nilsson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:14:37 +0000

Drawn with wacom tablet and the amazing MyPaint!

Painting the search

Andreas Nilsson — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:59:32 +0000

One of the cool things I like about the upcoming Thunderbird 3.0 is that it’s now really easy to find the phone number to that dude your friend e-mailed you a month ago, or to track down who it was that arranged the Christmas concert your choir attended three years ago. This is thanks to the new search function, called Gloda. I got the opportunity to help out with the design of the UI stuff for this, so I wanted to highlight some parts of the design process.

The filters

The early versions of Gloda put a lot of emphasis on the filters that further let you drill down your results. Actually, it had so much emphasis on them that the poor search results got put away at the bottom of the screen. It was a bit tricky finding them there, witch is unfortunate for a search interface.

The solution was a sidebar that clearly put apart filters and results and we were able to cut down the amount of text used by turning some of the true/false switches into the more human-readable (and space saving) check-boxes. We also merged all the to:s and from:s to just People among other things.

The style for the button widgets in the sidebar was a hard decision to make. While they are clearly different in style from the other buttons used in Thunderbird (and on the rest of the desktop), they also have less of a tendency to take attention away from the more important search results, and in this case, that’s a good thing.

The search box

To begin with, the gloda search box was a separate box from the old filtering box. We thought about dealing with this putting the filter box just above the message header pane, but because this would result in showing fewer headers we settled on a approach where we merged the two search fields into one and in the end. Thinking about it some more, it really makes sense, since it’s just about finding things, regardless how things work under the hood.

Timeline

The timeline allows you to see where in time your messages live and hovering a filter in the sidebar highlight where in time that filter applies. We initially discussed showing this in the sidebar, but due to the horizontal space constrains there, we decided to put it in the search results pane. The timeline is hidden by default so it won’t get in the way of the search results.

Looking ahead
There is still lots of improvements that can be made and it would be great to hear how the new search works for you, your friends and relatives.

Get Beta4 or grab the upcoming RC1 when it comes out and try it out!