Notes upon installing Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0

  • The interface looks much cleaner, much neater. The new default icon set is at once less busy and more attractive, giving the application a much-needed facelift.
  • Almost everything is in the same place as before. That’s good. Some functionality has been renamed. That’s alright.
  • Tabs are good, but they’re essentially the same as the Labels they replace, a major exception being the ability to apply more than one Tag. Which is troublesome, actually, because they’re still numbered by what I can only assume is priority and have the ability to turn the subject line of your email different colours (a helpful visual clue for important messages, or simply marking which messages have been dealt with). But if you add more than one tag, the colour system obviously doesn’t follow. It remains the colour of the highest priority tag. I find this somewhat clumsy.
  • Still on tabs here. If you add the “Tag” column to your second pane (as I’ve done), you can see what tags have been applied to your message. This is good, this is nice, but adding a tag to a message is still a three-click process, which is tedious, unless you remember what numbers are applied to which tags. Which is also clumsy. Tagging emails is a great feature, but let me show the Thunderbird developers what would make it an amazing feature: Allow me to click on the Tag Column portion of the second pane and have it turn into a text field (with a selectable tag list or tag cloud underneath) into which I can type and have Thunderbird autocomplete for me.
  • Still on tags. Please, divide them up with something. Like a comma. Or a pipe. Or a slash. I don’t care. At least then they don’t look like a badly-formed sentence.
  • The new mail notification is so much better than the old one, which was hopelessly broken beyond belief. It would report mail that was being marked as spam, mail that was routed directly to junk, mail that didn’t exist, and wouldn’t disappear from the system tray when the message it was reporting was clicked on (instead choosing to wait until I exited the folder). The new one seems to have solved these problems, is better to look at, and contains more information than simply “MAIL IS HERE HURR”.
  • Folder summary popups are a nice feature. Don’t know if I’ll ever use it… except maybe when someone’s looking over my shoulder and I’ve got a barn-burner of an email coming in from my political dissident friends.
  • Installation was fast, too. Surprisingly so.
  • One last thing. Thunderbird needs a distributed installation system for Windows. I really don’t want to walk around to 20 desktops and make sure each one is dandy.
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Posted April 25th, 2007 in main. Tagged: , , .

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