Authoring Beautiful HTML...

...ain't easy in the open source world, as David Ascher points out in this post:

However, for regular folks, life is not rosy yet in the Open Web world. Authoring beautiful HTML is, even with design and graphics talent, still way, way too hard. I’m writing this using Wordpress 2.8, which has probably some of the best user experience for simple HTML authoring. As Matt Mullenweg (the founder of Wordpress) says, it’s still not good enough. As far as I can tell, there are currently no truly modern, easy to use, open source HTML composition tools that we could use in Thunderbird for example to give people who want to design wholly original, designed email messages. That’s a minor problem in the world of email, which is primarily about function, not form, and I think we’ll be able to go pretty far with templates, but it’s a big problem for making design on the web more approachable.

There are some valiant efforts to clean up the old, crufty, scary composer codebase that Mozilla has relied on for years. There are simple blog-style editors like FCKEditor and its successor CKEditor. There are in-the-browser composition tools like Google Pages or Google Docs, but those are only for use by Google apps, and only work well when they limit the scope of the design space substantially (again, a rational choice). None of these can provide the flexibility that Ventura Publisher or PageMaker had in the dark ages; none of them can compete from a learnability point of view with the authoring tools that rely on closed stacks; none of them allow the essential polish that hand-crafted code can yield. That’s a gap, and an opportunity.

Let's hope people in the free software world seize it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

How Should Mozilla Execute Its Vision?

On Linux Journal.

Thunderbird is Go

On Open Enterprise blog.

Thunderbird the Phoenix?

As a keen Thunderbird user I've voiced my concerns that it was turning into the Cinderella of the open source world. That's why I've been watching the moves of the new company that's been set up to oversee its development - and the postings of its head, David Ascher. He's now published his Thoughts on Thunderbird's Evolution, and they're well worth reading.

In the light of certain suggestions, I was comforted to read the following:

Mozilla is unique in that among all of the “vendors” of messaging technology, it is the only organization driven by the public benefit. This should allow us to meet the user’s needs directly, without having to get distracted by exit strategies, analysts, etc. It also makes it easier to recruit volunteers!

Indeed.

Spicing Up Thunderbird

As I've noted before, one of the key features of free software is its modularity. From this and the underlying licence flows the ability to mix and match different elements to produce new applications.

Here's a good example:

Synovel, a startup based on Hyderabad, India founded by a group of International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) graduates, has released a preview of Spicebird, a Mozilla-based collaboration suite.

Spicebird is built on Thunderbird and Lightning, the powerful extension that adds calendaring functions to Thunderbird. Additionally it seems to integrate SamePlace, a Firefox extension that provides instant messaging capabilities based on the Jabber protocol.

Interesting to see that this is coming out of India - not currently a hotbed of such open source startups, but an area I'm sure we'll be hearing more from in the future.

And as David Ascher, who heads up a new company that aims to build software based on Thunderbird, points out:

There are lots of young companies in the same space, each promoting their own angle on solving the problem that they’ve identified. There are companies playing within the Outlook/Exchange framework. There are companies coming at it with Exchange replacements. There are companies focusing on collaboration rather than communication. There are companies with a web focus, others with a mobile focus, others with a social network focus.

But as he also notes, there are very particular advantages to working in the open source space:

From the project health point of view, I think it’s good to have various companies building products off of the Mozilla codebase in general. At the very least, it means that the platform won’t get too tied to any one product’s requirements. I don’t think there’s a huge risk of that happening, because Mozilla already supports several active products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Komodo, Songbird, Miro, Joost, etc.). But having more people care about the mail/news bits should at least help with the engineering work we need to do there which is product-independent. There are long-standing architectural problems with the system which haven’t been fixed because of a lack of resources. With several companies betting on this platform, as long as the discussions happen in public and in good faith, we should be able to work together to improve things for all.

Thunderbird Spreads its Wings

I was muttering darkly about Thunderbird's future, and the worrying attitude the Mozilla Foundation seemed to be taking to this key program. Happily, they have got their brains in gear again, and come up with the following wizard plan:

Mozilla today announced a new initiative to stimulate innovation in Internet mail and communications. Mozilla plans to develop Internet communications software based on the Thunderbird product, code and brand. The new initiative also aims to nurture a robust developer ecosystem in order to drive improvements through open source and community innovation, in the tradition of the Firefox web browser.

...

Mozilla will provide US$3 million seed funding to establish this new company.

Millions of people around the world rely on Thunderbird as their primary mail application. Nothing will change for current Thunderbird users. Mozilla will continue to provide Thunderbird users with regular security and stability updates as it establishes its new initiative, and remains committed to the needs of Thunderbird users.