Spicebird

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.

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.

For Spicebird 0.7 we are planning an extension for bloggers with the following idea:

Things are moving ahead steadily towards Spicebird Beta 0.7. We will have all the features listed in our Roadmap, except basic email tabs. We had to shift email tabs to the next version to ensure we can work on more stable tabs implementation. We are planning to release 0.7 by mid of June, 2008. The deadlines are as usual tight and require us to spend marathon hours at work. Though that can be an excuse for not many updates from us, we will try to keep posting as & when we have some time.

Most of you would have already seen the IM that we had in the 0.4 release and a lot of feedback did reach us.  There were thoughts on improving the windows, the integration and requests to support more IM protocols (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ and more).  We did brain-storm a lot on how to solve these issues, and here is the new Telepathy based recipe we came up with.  We are still experimenting and are not really sure how this experiment would end up, specially for Windows.

Its been more than three weeks since we released the first public beta of Spicebird. So, what have we done since then and what has changed in our priorities and roadmap?