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Thunderbird 115

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Re: Thunderbird 115

#271

Post by jrm4 »

Derbasti wrote: post #233
jrm4 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Is it JUST WORDS if someone insults you or your work? Or does it still hurt? At the very least we can be constructive and civil.

I agree in the abstract. But as I have seen lately, devs (or dev advocates) are pretty snowflakey.

Probably because I think the "average" open source dev has more or less "lost the plot?" A whole lot of trying to beat Steve Jobs at his own game and far less "lets make solid software that works well for people all the time."

Re: Thunderbird 115

#272

Post by orra »

PopAlongKid wrote: post #244
orra wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I obviously don't begrudge the fact Thunderbird currently works for you. But there are a few issues with the current UI: * Dark mode didn't exist for a long time, and I'm glad it does, but messages are still displayed brightly. * The list of emails always has a columns and a header; there's no simplified vertical view. * There's a threading view, but IIRC it doesn't combine sent and received messages into the same th…

>it doesn't combine sent and received messages into the same thread view. As I posted above, there is a setting for saving sent emails in the inbox along with received messages, so that threads are complete.

Thanks, if I'm honest I had skimmed over that setting before, not understanding its purpose. (It also looks like they're now introducing a unified inbox, which is what I wanted.)

Re: Thunderbird 115

#273

Post by wpietri »

danpalmer wrote: post #160
eps wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they listen to the opinions of random newcomers?

In my experience most communities like this are quite unreceptive to feedback – both in hoops you have to jump through to give it, and in terms of attitude from maintainers. I haven't engaged with the Thunderbird feedback process so this may be unfair to them, but it's a broad perception I have and so I think organisations that do want the feedback or do want first-time contributors need to push hard to make that hap…

I mean, I get that. It has to be the very rare open source project where the major bottleneck is insufficient opinions, especially of the very common "strident and underinformed" variety.

I had MITMed my robot vacuum and discovered that it, like a disaffected teen, hung out in a chat room all day. I created a little python library to send it some XMPP messages so I could work around the app's terrible scheduling and put some commands in a cron file. And then I open sourced the code, because why not share?

It was a happy day for me when that robot died. Then I had a legitimate reason for archiving the project and never dealing with a user request/opinion.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#274

Post by tired-turtle »

danpalmer wrote: post #92

I can't believe how janky this still looks after a UI overhaul. Text is misaligned in lots of places, the icons are fuzzy, spacing and padding is inconsistent even within the same areas, there are 3 sets of 3-dot icons in the sidebar in two different axes. It's just careless. Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This…

Without context, this also describes Microsoft Outlook on Mac.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#275

Post by hendersoon »

danpalmer wrote: post #92

I can't believe how janky this still looks after a UI overhaul. Text is misaligned in lots of places, the icons are fuzzy, spacing and padding is inconsistent even within the same areas, there are 3 sets of 3-dot icons in the sidebar in two different axes. It's just careless. Most users don't care about the alignment and spacing and so on in isolation, but they do get a sense of quality from the overall impact. This…

After 20 years I'm still amazed they finally got multi-row listings working. I honestly never thought I'd see the day.

New Thunderbird development is glacially slow, but to their credit they have kept the software functional and fixed any security bugs over the decades. And of course, it's free.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#276

Post by dbg31415 »

These guys have a steep hill to climb.

One huge problem with open-source "hobby" projects is that they tend to not have designers when they need them. A dev sets out to build something, and then after it works asks a designer to help clean it up.

If you want a polished and "nice" application, getting a designer involved before you code is key. Retrofitting designs to dev work is going to be spotty at best.

It sort of looks better, but it doesn't look "good" by modern standards. It still looks like Frankenstein... but at least he's got some lipstick that matches his nails.

It's a tough spot, and you see it all the time when dealing with things built without designers.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#277

Post by hendersoon »

danpalmer wrote: post #160
eps wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they listen to the opinions of random newcomers?

In my experience most communities like this are quite unreceptive to feedback – both in hoops you have to jump through to give it, and in terms of attitude from maintainers. I haven't engaged with the Thunderbird feedback process so this may be unfair to them, but it's a broad perception I have and so I think organisations that do want the feedback or do want first-time contributors need to push hard to make that hap…

I have engaged with it. They definitely aren't receptive and development moves excruciatingly slowly, but I wouldn't attribute that to being negative so much as strictly limited resources.

Thunderbird is what it is; if you find it useful in its current incarnation use it (I do), but don't expect it to noticeably improve at the rate we've come to anticipate from other open-source projects. Even though Thunderbird is very popular by common open-source metrics for whatever reason it just doesn't move very quickly.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#278

Post by diffeomorphism »

xattt wrote: post #245
rudasn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, image you're the new hire and you are welcomed to this massive code base with thousands of files, each thousands of lines long, without some clear separation of concerns or "basic modern best practices". And the first thing you do, is tell everyone how shit their code looks. The same code that pays for yours and everyone else's paychecks. What do you think is going to happen?

Most users don’t have the time to gain entrée into a developer community.

But apparently have the time to write long insulting sermons.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#279

Post by andrewgioia »

nik736 wrote: post #16

What happened to the look that was announced? [0] The announcement was way more modern than the screenshot that is shown now. [0]: https://developer.thunderbird.net/planning/roadmap

Looks like that page was edited a few minutes ago to remove the content/screenshots.

Here's what it looked like last month: https://web.archive.org/web/20230614035125/https://developer...

Totally agreed, I was so excited when I saw these mockups and I hate to be negative but the shipped changes so far are much less exciting.

Re: Thunderbird 115

#280

Post by landgenoot »

I think it is really impressing to see that they upgraded the interface while maintaining backwards compatibility. I have been running the Beta for a couple of months now, but I had to modify settings to keep up with the design changes.

One thing I haven't found out is how to disable tabs. I think it is strange that you can switch between calendar, contacts and mail using the left menu. But the switcher opens new tabs instead.

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