Spicebird Beta 0.7 Release Notes

Spicebird is a free and open source collaboration client from Synovel. Spicebird simplifies communication for users by providing integrated access to the various tools of collaboration in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while users can retain all the advantages of a desktop application.

This release notes deals with changes made to Spicebird Beta since 0.4 version. For a more introductory discourse of Spicebird features, see Spicebird 0.4 Release Notes.

Google Applets in Home Screen

You can now add Google Gadgets to Spicebird.

Functionality of thousands of Google Gadgets is now available in Spicebird home screen.

Some fun gadgets too.

Google Gadgets that are RSS feeds are converted into Spicebird RSS feed applets.

All New Instant Messaging

Based on a powerful instant messaging framework called Telepathy, Spicebird now supports many new protocols in addition to Google Talk and Jabber: AIM, ICQ, Novel Groupwise, MSN, MySpace, QQ, Simple and Yahoo.

Spicebird can inter-operate with other Telepathy based instant messengers. For example, it is possible to login to your chat accounts in Empathy and see the status/start a chat in Spicebird! (available only with Spicebird shipped with distributions).

The left pane in contacts tab shows a conventional buddy list.

Large number of chat windows can optionally be managed as a chat tab.

Status bar now always displays your chat status. You can also change the status of all chat accounts from here.

In future, it is easy to add support for VOIP and video chat because of the powerful framework.

Google Calendar

Access your Google calendars in Spicebird.

Google Account

Configure mail, calendar and chat capabilities of your Google account in one step.

Blogs

Experimental support to manage blogs has been added. It currently supports MetaWeblog API and services like Drupal, Jeeran, Windows Live Spaces, Roller and WordPress.

Posting to a blog is similar to composing a mail.

A mail like interface for publishing, moving, deleting of blog posts.

In future, comments to blog posts could be shown similar to email threaded conversations.

Import/Export Features

• If you are a Thundebird/Lightning user, you may migrate your profile using the new Thundebird profile migrator. The profile migrator is automatically triggered when you don't have any Spicebird profiles.
  
• It is also possible to:
  • Import mails and settings from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express
  • Import/export addressbooks in CSV, LDIF and TSV formats
  • Import/export calendars in ICS and CSV format (works with Microsoft Outlook)

Choice of Applications

Spicebird will have more applications in future. Users who don't use certain applications can now turn them off in preferences.

For example, it is possible to turn off Chat and Calendar applications.

Tons of Bug fixes and Minor Improvements

This version of Spicebird is based on work done for Mozilla Thundebird 3.0a2 and Lightning 0.9pre. Over 300 bugs and issues were fixed in Spicebird itself since 0.4 release! Some of these are:

• Mozilla platform memory improvements
• Support for dark desktop themes
• Support for meeting requests in mails
• Shorter date display in mail list view

Locales

As a fruit of contributions Spicebird received from its community, Spicebird Beta 0.7 will be available in more than 10 languages.

Extensions

Spicebird now has its own add-ons site with a basic set of add-ons.

User Extensions

• Windows System Tray
• Locale Switcher
• GmailUI
• Nostalgy
• Attachment Extractor

Developer Extensions

• Console²
• Dom inspector
• Extension Developer
• Javascript Debugger

Known Issues

• AIM and ICQ protocols don't work on Windows
• Blogs support is experimental
• Suite hangs occasionally when unable to connect to IMAP server
• Event detection in mail text is limited
• Google calendar does not work after auto-update from 0.4. Work around is to perform a manual install of 0.7.