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 is a bug fix release with many small features additions. Changes include launch fixes, memory fixes, better support for non-English text, more chat preferences and more add-ons.

For a detailed description of this release, see the release notes.

Get Spicebird!

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:

• Chat with friends on services like Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber
• Add iGoogle Gadgets to Spicebird
• Disable the applications that are unused
• Access Google calendar
• Experimental support for managing blogs
• Available in more than 10 languages
• Basic set of add-ons
• Import data from Thunderbird, Outlook and Outlook Express

For a detailed description of this release, see the release notes.

Get Spicebird!

For quite some time now, we had machines building various varieties of Spicebird every night. These builds are meant for testing code and localizations. English (US) builds are available for Windows 32 bit, GNU/Linux 32 bit and GNU/Linux 64 bit. Installable language packs and GNU/Linux 32/64 bit localized builds are available for all locales that have been checked into the code repository.

Localizers can test full localized builds on GNU/Linux or language packs applied over English (US) build on Windows. In the later case, the locale switcher extension will be needed.

Happy testing! Please report bugs and suggestions to Spicebird issue tracker.

The upcoming Spicebird 0.7 will support iGoogle applets. You will be able to add iGoogle's Applets to Spicebird's home screen, along with 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.

Translating Spicebird to your language just got much simpler. Simply head to BabelZilla.org, register an account and start translating the strings from the Spicebird section.

BabelZilla has a Web Translation System which shows English strings, string ids and asks input of translated string into a text field on a web page. Translators do not need to know the complex process of using scripts or understanding the syntax of various files.

Here is yet another way you can get involved with Spicebird development. Bring Spicebird to your language! Instructions to create a localization for Spicebird are now available on the wiki.

The effort involved in the localizing Spicebird to a language is relatively less if Thunderbird and/or Mozilla Calendar are translated to the desired locale. After the initial review and checkin of your localization, you may apply for an SVN account inorder to commit your updates directly to Spicebird source code repository. As Spicebird evolves towards 1.0, the localizations will also need updating.

A new mailing list and a discussion forum for have been setup for discussing localization related issues.

Spicebird now has a public code repository and an issue tracker.

The code repository (Subversion) can be used to browse through the source code or to check out the latest Spicebird code. The web interface also allows querying for changes on the repository. Subversion web-interface is available at https://svn.spicebird.org/viewvc/collab for browsing. Please go through the documentation on how to checkout the latest Spicebird source code.

Bugzilla, our issue tracker lets the users report bugs, request feature enhancements and submit patches to Spicebird. The Spicebird Bugzilla is available at http://bugzilla.spicebird.org/