Yearly Archives: 2011

My Thunderbird / Firefox wallet – one of a kind

My friend Joel Beck is kind of a badass.

When he’s not designing / building reactors for Atlantic Hydrogen in New Brunswick, he’s learning all sorts of cool skills.

Skills like leather-working.

Look what he gave me as an early Xmas gift:

[shashin type=”photo” id=”812,810,811,809,808,807,806″ size=”medium” columns=”max” order=”user” position=”center”]

This is a one-of-a-kind, hand-made leather wallet, made by my good friend Joel Beck.

Thanks Joel.

Build Thunderbird Faster on Windows

There’s no denying it: the vast majority of Thunderbird users are using some flavour of Windows.

So it’s a bit strange that I do most of my development on Linux, and use Thunderbird most regularly on Mac OSX.

Therefore, I’ve recently gotten a hold of a new, super-powerful Windows 7 box.  Furthermore, in an effort to better understand what my users go through and experience, I’ll also be using Thunderbird on Windows as my primary mechanism for reading my mail.

So that’s all good, but there’s one problem:  building Thunderbird on Windows takes forever.

But it doesn’t have to.

So the Simple Build Instructions for Thunderbird instructs developers to get the MozillaBuild package, which includes a bunch of the tools you need to get Mozilla stuff up and building on Windows.  One of those tools is “make“, which is a tool that originates from the world of UNIX and Linux.

The problem with the make included with MozillaBuild is that it doesn’t take advantage of multiple processor cores on Windows.  So even if you have a crazy-powerful 8-core machine, when you just use the vanilla “make -f client.mk” command, you’re only going to be using one of your cores.

Enter pymake.  Pymake is a Mozilla-maintained mostly-compatible implementation of make in Python.  The advantage?  On Windows, we can finally use all of our cores.

So here’s how to set that up.

  1. I assume you’ve followed the instructions for setting up your Windows build environment, laid out here.
  2. I also assume you’ve checked out a copy of comm-central, have set up your .mozconfig, and have run “python client.py checkout” to grab Gecko, etc.
  3. If your Windows username has a space in it, like “Mike Conley”, you might want to create a new Windows account for the stuff we’re about to do.  I use “mconley”.
  4. You’re going to want to alias pymake – open up an editor, and create a file called .profile under C:/Users/[username]/  (I assume you’re on the C drive anyhow, and are using Windows 7)
  5. In that .profile file, put in the following line:   alias pymake=/c/Users/[username]/[path to comm-central]/mozilla/build/pymake/make.py
  6. Restart your shell, and ensure there are no errors in the first couple of lines that spring up at the top.  If you type pymake, it should say towards the bottom “No makefile found”.
  7. Go to the parent of your comm-central directory, and create a new directory for your obj-dir (where your binaries and executable will eventually end up).\
  8. In that directory, run the command:  “../comm-central/configure” – so we’re invoking the configure within the comm-central directory, but within the obj-dir folder we created
  9. The configure might fail while looking for the compiler.  Just try it again until it works.  *sigh*.
  10. Once the configure command is done, within your obj-dir folder, type:   pymake -sj4 (or 8, if you have 8 cores)

And blam, now you’re cookin’!

I can get a debug build done, from scratch, in about 22 minutes.  Woo!

UPDATE

You can also replace steps 8 – 10 with the following:

  1. In your objdir, type:  MOZCONFIG=../srcdir/.mozconfig pymake -sj6 -f ../srcdir/client.mk
  2. Eat sandwich while build completes

Creating a new Thunderbird Address Book: the feature page, and some literature…

So my dream of redesigning / rebuilding the Thunderbird address book is moving forward.  Here’s the draft feature page.

I also got the Contacts add-on from Labs working (limping, rather) in Thunderbird.  Some very interesting ideas in that add-on.

I’ve also started reading some related work.  Here’s what I’ve been gazing at for the past few days:

  1. Bug 674720 (WebContacts or Contacts+)
  2. The W3C Contacts API draft spec
  3. The PortableContacts draft spec
  4. The vCard spec
  5. The Firefox Sync development documents

So, basically, I’m exposing myself to as much current work in this problem space as possible.  Is there anything else I should be reading?

Whoops – I forgot I was a scientist

So yesterday I posted some mock-ups for a new Thunderbird address book design, and I got a bunch of really awesome, useful feedback.

Probably what rang out loudest for me was that I don’t really have any data on how real users actually use Thunderbird’s address book.  I know how I use it, but that’s about it.  In fact, I talked a Thunderbird user the other day who didn’t even know that the Thunderbird address book existed.  Go figure.

And here I went and jumped the gun, and tossed together some mock-ups.

If there’s anything that my grad supervisor Greg Wilson taught me, it’s not to jump to conclusions (or mock-ups) when we don’t have any data to back it up.  I’m a scientist, damn it, and that’s just how we roll.

Credit: http://cowbirdsinlove.com/46

 

Firefox has this great add-on called Test Pilot that lets Firefox users volunteer to have data periodically collected from them.  Work to get Test Pilot working for Thunderbird is underway, and I think that’d be an awesome tool for gathering feedback about how users use the address book.

Some questions I’d want answered, right off the top of my dome, in no particular order:

  1. Does anybody actually use Thunderbird’s address book?
  2. When someone is using the address book, what are they likely doing?
    1. Looking for a contact?
    2. Sorting and organizing their contacts?
    3. Creating or editing contacts?
    4. Other?
  3. Do people use mailing lists?  If so, how many do they tend to have?
  4. How many address books do people tend to have?
  5. How many address books do people want to have?
  6. How many contacts to people tend to have in their address books?
  7. Is it important for people to be able to group their contacts into sets, like “Family”, “Friends”, “Acquaintances”, “Employees”, “Co-workers”, etc?
  8. Given several address books, where each address book has some large number of contacts, how quickly can an individual contact be found?
  9. How much switching back and forth from mouse and keyboard is required to create a new contact, or to edit an old contact?
  10. How important is it for Thunderbird’s contacts to be synchronized with other contact services, like Google Contacts or the OSX address book?
    1. Or is it sufficient just to import them?
  11. How important is it for Thunderbird’s contacts to be synchronized with user’s mobile devices?
  12. On average, how long does it take to create a new contact?
  13. On average, how long does it take to edit a contact?
  14. On average, how much time are users spending in the address book?
  15. What fields do most users want to associate with a contact?
  16. What are the top 10 complaints about Thunderbird’s address book?
  17. What are the top 10 best things about Thunderbird’s address book?

What are some other questions I should try to get answered?

UPDATE (Aug 29 – 10:00EST)

I’ve gotten some awesome feedback on this post, and some new questions to add to my list.  Here they are, in no particular order:

  1. What is the main way in which Thunderbird users use and manipulate their address books?
    1. Through the main address book interface
    2. Through the contacts sidebar in the compose window
    3. Through the inline contact editor within a message header
    4. Other?
  2. If the answer to the above is anything other than 1, is it possible that the address book manager is not needed?  Or does not need to be as complicated as it already is?
  3. How many duplicate contacts does the average user possess (where a duplicate contact is a contact with the same e-mail address, or possibly the same name)
  4. How frustrating is it to add a contact in Thunderbird?
  5. How frustrating is it to edit a contact in Thunderbird?
  6. How frustrating is it to search for a contact in Thunderbird?
  7. How often do users want to create a contact based on a pre-existing one?  Example – creating co-workers, with similar fields for work addresses, etc, but different names, phones, etc.