Blogs

Niru Mehta - former MD - Avaya Global Connect, is set to join the board of Synovel. Mr. Mehta has over 29 years of experience in Telecom at Bell Labs and Avaya. He was the CEO for Avaya (A US based $5B revenue leader in communication solutions) in India for over 11 years. He has led Avaya towards unmatched revenue growth during his tenure and established Avaya as a market leader in Unified Communications space. His efforts have won him numerous awards including CEO of the year by Frost & Sullivan.

Mr. Mehta brings in his vast of experience in enterprise communications space and leadership to help propel Synovel towards its mission.

Every enterprise today knows what open source is all about. They also understand the broader value proportion that is can offer. But, when it comes to adoption of open source products, either free or commercial, the major pull comes from the cost reduction generally associated with it. One important advantage this is generally overlooked is the feasibility and ease of integration with other applications and customization.

Integration and customization, however, is not limited to just open source software. Some proprietary format/protocol based products address the integration aspect by providing web service APIs. Such integration is limited by the extent of access to data/functionality provided by the vendor. With open source and open standards based products on the other hand, there is virtually unlimited scope for integration and customization.

Ever worried about losing information in chat sessions when using Spicebird? You don't have to anymore. Spicebird now maintains a chat history. The latest nightly builds include this feature.

A new chat history window shows the list of all archived chat sessions. It can be opened by clicking 'Chat -> Chat History' in the 'Contacts' or 'Chats' tab.

The window has two primary sections. The left pane contains a list with each item showing the contact, date and a preview text of a chat session. The right pane shows the chat session corresponding to the item selected in the left pane.

Many addons can be ported from Thundebird/Sunbird to Spicebird with little effort not even requiring knowledge of extension development. Others require some effort and understanding of Mozilla extension development. Now there is a tutorial to help you get your favorite addon ported to Spicebird.

Fedora 10 users can now install Spicebird Beta 0.7 from the Fedora updates repository. Many thanks to Steven M. Parrish, Spicebird Fedora package maintainer.

Slowly but surely, the word about Spicebird has caught on and its spreading like wild fire now. The total Spicebird download count (for versions 0.4 and 0.7) crossed a hundred thousand. It stands at 140,780 as on today from Spicebird.com alone.

The Spicebird team thanks and congratulates all the developers, localizers, bloggers and the user community who helped Spicebird achieve this remarkable feat. We will continue to improve Spicebird to make it more feature rich and widely acceptable. Thanks for your patronage.

Release announcement from Spicebird.com :

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and integration among its components.

This release of Spicebird adds the following functionality:

When we set course for 0.7 release, the major objective was to include support for multi-protocol Instant Messaging, blogging and many other changes to the UI & features. Prasad already gave an update about this. We had to take unexplored paths and sometimes we were not be able to guage how deep the rabbit hole was. It sure did take a huge effort, but after solving the challenges, we have been running smoothly for quite sometime now. For the purpose of numbers, 108 bugs were fixed in the last month.

The upcoming Spicebird 0.7 will support iGoogle applets. You will be able to add iGoogle's applets to Spicebird's home screen, along the current Applets. Most of the current applets on iGoogle work on Spicebird.

You can add an applet by dragging its image on the "Add Stuff" page in iGoogle, into the Google Applet in Spicebird. The image on the right shows a Google Maps applet added to Spicebird's home screen.

Recently I had to create an XPCOM component in javascript. The interface had a function, parse, defined as below:

interface xxx: nsISupports {
    ...
    void parse(in AString data, out AString info, out boolean success);
    ...
}

I intend to describe the implementation of functions with out parameters and their usage. Though it may be too obvious for experienced xpcom/xul programmers, I hope this might help newbies.

I did not find much help online. Thanks to the guys in mozilla #extdev, #xul irc channels. It would not have been easy if not for their (quick) responses.

MDC has an article on creating an XPCOM component. I will not get into any details of component creation here.