Spicebird: Beyond 0.8

The Spicebird project started more than two years ago and then had a decently well planned Roadmap.  However, a lot has changed in the last couple of years and I think its time to re-think the next steps - this time we hope to involve the community in helping us decide what is important and what isn’t.

Here is a list of things that we have been thinking about

1. Mail context: Take advantage of the mail index to provide additional details about each mail and it’s sender.  The current plan is to have an optional “context bar” on the right side of the window that will display a list of recent mails from the sender, recent attachments sent by the sender as well as others mails in this conversation.
2. Switch the chat back-end: We currently use Telepathy which is a very well thought out and an amazing framework for instant messaging applications.  However, it comes with a different set of problems.  Most of our work with Spicebird is currently going into chat and a significant part of it into fixing and maintaining Telepathy and related libraries on Windows (we are yet to start working on a Mac).  A switch to other library (probably Gloox) would hopefully let us concentrate more on our roadmap.
3. Drop support for chat protocols other than Jabber/XMPP: XMPP is now a well supported protocol in the instant messaging world.  It is extensible and makes it possible to develop applications on top of it that can communicate directly with each other - something that must be part of any communication and collaboration suite.
4. CalDAV support in calendar:  Yes, the calendar already supports CalDAV, but it is definitely not the right shape. Shared and group calendars as well as many other features of CalDAV aren’t easy to implement without ending up with ugly code/architecture!  We want to improve the situation there.
5. Addons:  This needs a lot of help from the community.  Most Thunderbird addons work fine by adding Spicebird to the list of supported applications in the addon.  There are a few addons that might need more work, but the Spicebird developers are always ready to help developers port their addons!
6. Language Packs: We did have people contribute some languages to Spicebird in that past.  But quite a few strings have changed in Spicebird and we hope to get back the translators to help us do the translations.
7. Mac builds:  We currently don’t ship Spicebird on Mac.  We are desperately trying to get this working as soon as possible.
8. Unified accounts management:  Currently the accounts management is pretty fragmented - each application lists the configured accounts in a different place.  We ought to come up with an extensible accounts framework where all supported accounts could added/deleted.  To start with applications could use their current dialogs for editing the accounts.
9. Add some social networking features to contacts: Let the contacts tab talk to various social networks and display contact information, their current status etc;  Possibly provide a way to communicate with the user through the social network.  The biggest problem with this is the number of networks that we can support.  There are too many social networks to mark this feature “done”.

Please feel free to comment on any of the above and add more to this list.  But please understand that we have limited resources.  If you are a developer and would like to help us with Spicebird development, please feel free to contact me.

Update: Another important thing we want to do is to launch Spicebird more regularly - probably keep less than 6 months between releases.  We would also try to release weekly builds (which may sometimes be very very unstable) and keep reporting progress more frequently.

Update: Fixed a few typos.