Hi Guys,
As part of a planned update to this site, I have had to lock down comments for a day or two while I sort out the transfer of data from Wordpress to Drupal. Please bear with me, there will be news soon, I don’t plan on going AWOL!!!
Cheers
Well, I have been quite quiet lately, that’s because I was down with a stomach bug/flu and ended up spending quite a while at home resting. Normally that would have meant a greater deal of time spent working on my ‘projects’, but unfortunately I could not bear to stare at a computer screen [ in all of its WUXGA glory 
].
Anyway, I am back. Back in business. I just sent out a beta of the Send Later Extension to some of the beta testers. I have a few more blog posts planned for this week. I also plan to add a forum to this website for helping out people with some of my software releases. I am also working on a ‘new’ project which I will make public soon.
Hope everybody is keeping well.
I did not intend for this to take so long, but here we are. There is a lot of progress going on in the development of the “Send Later” extension version 1.2.0 and a couple of beta versions have been tested by few of the users and some of their feedback has been incorporated into the extension. I hope to release this as soon as possible, please hang on :-). Meanwhile, if you are interested in beta testing please leave a comment below, I will try to entertain as many as I can before the list gets too big.
Have a nice day y’all.
Frustrated that you cannot add a custom toolbar in Mozilla Thunderbird [Something you can do easily in Firefox], I wrote this extension.
Read more here .
If you have any comments / problems, please discuss below.
Cheers, I am going to sleep now.
Microsoft Office 97 was the last version of the Office Suite from Microsoft that I ever used. Ever since I got hooked on to OpenOffice I have never felt the need/urge to go back to the dark side . I have been using OpenOffice for quite a few years now, and I have seen then evolve over the years into a robust and mature product. Of course they have had a lot of support from Sun Microsystems and a lot of other corporate sponsors, but there are huge amounts of contribution from a wide range of people donating their time to the cause of Free Software.
One of the most useful features I have always used in OpenOffice is the ability to “Export to PDF” right from the File menu, no complicated plugins, no fake printer drivers. Easy as.
Of course one of the only things I have missed over the years in OpenOffice is a credible replacement for Microsoft Access. Recently the OpenOffice Base application is touted as that replacement, but I have always had a LOT of trouble getting it to work [since beta days]. The Access replacement would definitely need to be “Office Killer” quality application, not the cursory equivalent.
I wish I had a LOT of time on hand to help out in the effort for an Access Replacement. I say LOT of time since I am pretty sure a LOT of time gets used up in defining standards and then implementing them, its definitely a LOT easier to create an Access Replacement in the Cathedral rather than the Bazaar. 
If you feel like it and/or can afford it please consider contributing to OpenOffice.org. [Mention my name and you get a discount of 100% on the next free version of OpenOffice ]
Over the next few days I will write a bit about other Free Software Tools that I use. I must admit I am a fan, A HUGE FAN. I wish I could contribute, and I will, I suggest you try your best too.
I have been in touch with a few people and requested help in translating/localizing the Send Later Extension
So far the response has been quite favorable, I am quite impressed. So if you are someone who is quite well versed in any non-English language, please get in touch with me and we can organize to get the strings in the extension localized. This would help a great deal in maintaining some sort of consistency in the look and feel of the user interface for non-English installations. [I realized this personally when I saw a screen shot of the extension running on a Chinese version of Thunderbird.
Just to inform everybody that I am working on an update to the Send Later extension, the new version will have the following additional features/fixes:
I will do my best to deliver this sometime this weekend, but dont hold your breath [seriously.. DON’T].
If you have any minor feature requests please let me know below in the comments.
Last week I ranted about a new “feature” of Thunderbird 2.0, and now I have finally done something about it.
I wrote up an extension that will allow you to configure whether you want to see the new mail alert per account rather than a global enable / disable.
You can read more about it here. If you have any trouble using version 0.1.0 please let me know below and I will do my best to resolve problems.
One thing I have learnt from developing the Send Later extension is this:
Thunderbird is Mozilla’s step child.
I don’t mean that derogatorily, its just that I think Firefox has recieved a LOT of media attention and a LOT of community support that the lack of similar enthusiasm for Thunderbird is just completely out of whack. I find that the documentation for the mailnews API (Thunderbird specific XPCOM etc) is just ‘not there’. Most of the documentation is just auto generated from IDL and does not have any pointers/descriptions. So I pop onto IRC for the #extdev channel and they are a pretty helpful bunch, except not many know anything about the mailnews API. They are the first to point out that its going to be hard to find someone with knowledge of Thunderbird. (I wonder what the state Lightning etc are ?).
Eventually I had to dig up a lot of Thunderbird’s source code [God Bless Open Source], as well as read obscure mailing lists, as well as look at other people’s code to figure out “What would Stewie do?”.
And there is more… When I started I enthusiastically created myself an account at addons.mozilla.org as a developer and submitted the Send Later Extension. Till date there has been not one review/discussion.. So its basically in limbo/sandbox world. I need to have reviews first before I can nominate the extension for inclusion into the main site after which someone is supposed to review it and then put it on the public side of things.. By the time that happens [given the state of affairs] I would have aged considerably. 
[I hate to think what would happen everytime there is a bug fix or feature enhancement release].
But all this come back to the same basic caveat, Thunderbird is just not mom’s darling child.
Note: This is not an attack on the Mozilla team, they have done an incredible job. But maybe some of those google dollars can be spent on Thunderbird too.. Oh wait.. You can’t search google from Thunderbird [YET]
Earlier when I released version 1.1.5 of the Send Later extension for Thunderbird, I gave a big shout out to Miles from San Francisco. I really meant it. Here was a guy who was willing to put up with the rigors of Software Debugging on a platform that I [said developer] was just beginning to understand. He helped me a lot installing all of those point releases and capturing debug logs, scheduling emails and so on. But most importantly this experience gave me the pleasure of having helped a “community” of users. Any software developer worth his salt, develops for the pleasure, of seeing a user use / appreciate the product. On such occasions, the elation of having made somebody else’s day a little bit better is just great.
Miles wrote to me:
“Can’t wait to use it [the extension] and I know exactly where: I have a wholesale coffee company and I send and email msg out to my customers — restaurants, stores, etc on Friday advising them to order by Monday before 11 a.m. for the fresh coffee roast. So every Friday I must be at the computer at 7 a.m. to send the msg. Now, I can do it at my leisure on Thursday or whenever.”
And I am happy.
Note: I know everybody has their own usage scenario, I would love to hear from you. Oh, and not the usual ‘I was awake at this ungodly hour’ .