The 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 integration among its components.

This release is a bug fix release with many small features additions. Changes include launch fixes, memory fixes, better support for non-English text, more chat preferences and more add-ons.

For a detailed description of this release, see the release notes.

Get Spicebird Beta.  It’s still a beta software, but you can expect your e-mail to be pretty safe with it

The release will include the much awaited ICQ and AOL messenger support, preferences for Chat, icons in the menus and many many more fixes!

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.

• 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!

• 40 bugs blocking Spicebird Beta 0.7
• 16 assigned bugs
• Patches pending review would fix about 8 bugs

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.

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!

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

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!