The release announcement from spicebird.com.
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 intergration 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 desciption of this release, see the release notes.
Before you start using it, please understand that it’s still a beta product. However, it is stable and I have been using the alpha versions for all my e-mailing and calendaring needs for more than 6 months now.
The Spicebird team is happy to announce that the next Beta of Spicebird will be released on the 20th of November, 2008. Over the next five days, I will keep blogging about the various things that the Spicebird team has worked on to make Spicebird 0.7 more stable and better set for the later releases.
The next release has been round the corner for quite a while, here is the current status
- 7 bugs blocking the release (code)
- 5 of the 7 bugs already have patches up for review
- The other two being a build bug and another in calendar that we are struggling to reproduce!
So what’s left before the release?
- Setting up the addons repository (it’s already up there, but needs some testing and a good theme before the formal announcement)
- Making sure spicebird.com works fine in IE6 (It is an embarrassing and silly bug that was always there - we only use the standards compliant Firefox here)
- Some last-minute style improvements to Spicebird
- Finally, decide on a release date!
Recently Siva gave an update on Spicebird 0.7 - A few bugs were fixed after his update, a few more are assigned and already have attachments on them to be reviewed. The following gives a summary of the latest state
Apart from the pending patches, Sunil working on importing from Thunderbird/Lightning and Siva on importing mail and addressbooks from Microsoft Outlook did a wonderful job and are currently testing their work.
About 25 bugs were fixed over the last week and among them is the “0.7 cannot read calendars from 0.4″. The next release of Spicebird - the 0.7 is round the corner. About the release schedule, it’s a few blockers and a little testing thats needed, which could take upto 10 days.
We are also working on getting the addons site up and port the most-used thunderbird and calendar addons to Spicebird. We already have Enigmail, Nostalgy, Minimize to Tray and GMailUI and are working to have many more for Spicebird Beta 0.7!
Today I bought a new bike hoping to use it for a few kilometers every day - fifteen to start with. These few kilometer I hope would give me some physical excercise, save a little on my everyday carbon emissions and ofcourse save a little money for me - the fuel is pretty expensive these days 
Yes, I bought a Firefox Target and apart from the good reviews and the color combination, I like the brand! Its too early for me to review it, but I would soon do it. The first thing I did after purchasing it is to ride to office for a photo.
It cost me about 11,000 INR which is less than my two months spend on gas, but is pretty expensive considering how a bike is precieved in India.
By prasad | September 26, 2008
http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.24/
Empathy is a Telepathy framework based instant messaging client and its inclusion into GNOME 2.24 means that Telepathy and related libraries will be available on most linux distributions by default. That will make the life of Spicebird easier in the linux world
By prasad | September 22, 2008
Last week we had exciting time fixing many bugs on Spicebird - some of them crashers, Sunil committing his work on blogging and the new calendar-theme.
Starting with the 14th of September, the nightly builds have been randomly crashing on windows which a lot of users reported. The fixes were committed on Thursday and made their way to the Friday’s nightly builds. Apart from this few other smaller bugs were fixed through last week.
The calendar had a pending theme update, which was meant to make it more desktop friendly ofcourse not compromising on the visual aspects of it - more updates to the calendar usability are waiting!
By prasad | September 17, 2008
Today Ashok committed a patch on the Spicebird trunk that adds support for short-date formats in the e-mail listing. The Mozilla platform does have API and necessary enumerations to request short date formats, but underneath the implementation was missing and all it returned was the same long date format which looked like “Thursday 12 June 2008 08:51 PM”.
That was what we used in Spicebird earlier. Now, with the landing of this patch we have many different ways of showing the date
- Just the time for today’s messages
- Yesterday and the time for yesterday’s messages
- Mon…Sat and the time for other messages of this calendar week
- Day of month and the month for messages in this calendar year
- Day of month, month and the year for rest of the messages!
The formats are ofcourse localizable and the corresponding upstream bug is #455498.
By prasad | September 16, 2008
The Spicebird team was working behind-the-doors for quiet some time and its probably time to start involving the community more closely and to start posting updates more frequently - one summary update every week apart from the normal feature/development blogs.
Here is the current status of Spicebird and following it are the expected timelines for the 0.7 release.
The main features that were to be included in Spicebird 0.7 are the multi-protocol instant-messaging, the new face of blogging and of-course a lot of smaller look-and-feel and functionality fixes.
We started off expecting to build support for a “few famous” instant-messaging protocols and then we stumbled upon the Telepathy framework which made us rethink the “few famous” part. Telepathy is a D-Bus based unified framework for many kinds of real-time communications - it allows protocol transparent handling of instant-messaging both textual and multimedia. As a first step the current trunk of Spicebird already has support for one-to-one chat using the Yahoo, OSCAR, AIM, Jabber, ICQ and MSN protocols!
More details on Telepathy and how it can effect the user is out of the scope of this post, but please bear in mind that code in these parts of the trunk is rapidly changing and is pretty unstable 
The next one is the new-face of blogging. The work here is still in progress - keeping minor bugs aside, the system is already working well with Wordpress.
About the timelines of the next Spicebird Beta release, we are expecting to ship the 0.7 release in the second week of October and will follow it up with a quick next release cycle of two months.
I am Prasad Sunkari,
co-founder of