Bit Stampede

Okay, this account’s inbox is done downloading now.

This brings me to my next realization: there’s no “mark as read” button in the toolbar, nor is there one available to add to it. Wait, there’s something called “Mark.” I’ll try that and see what it does.

OK, cool, that toggles it. It would be nice if the label on the button told you want pressing it will actually do, but okay, it does what I want.

Time to add another account. My Mozilla one this time, I think.

Another thing: is there a way to have it not default to sending icky HTML email? There’s a setting for it, but I wish I didn’t have to set it separately for each account — it defaults to “Compose messages in HTML” for every new account.

When entering passwords, it would be nice if the bullet (“•”) were used instead of the more generic “*” for the hidden characters. Bullets are the standard for doing this on the Mac.

When I choose to delete the message I’m looking at in a separate window, I don’t want it to automatically pull up the next message. That’s really irritating. I want the window to close, since I’m done looking at it. The way things are now, I have to then re-mark the next message as unread if I’m not ready to look at it at the moment, which is often the case.

I just noticed that when I finish adding a new email address using the wizard, and it pops up the account settings sheet, it’s not selecting the newly-added account by default, so I tend to accidentally change the wrong account’s settings.

It would be nice if I could have an “Unread messages” smart mailbox like I have on the Mac, that shows all my unread messages regardless of which account they’re in. One-stop shopping for new mail.

The customize sound pane says you can use a custom “.wav” file, but in reality it appears to support AIFF as well.

(I’ll look into filing appropriate bug reports once I finish my initial pass through this stuff…)

First annoyance, and this is probably a deal-breaker for me.

I use SpamSieve to filter spam. It’s a fabulous spam filtering solution that, for me, has a 99.8% accuracy rate, is endlessly customizable, and works with almost every email program available for the Mac.

Except Thunderbird.

I paid good money for it, and love it, and am disinclined to give it up to switch to another email program unless that email program is so awesome I’m blinded by its magnificence.

Anyway, I’m soldiering on.

Second thing, which isn’t a deal-breaker by any strech but would be a nice touch: When setting up an account, it would be nice if there were a “.Mac” option, that would pre-fill fields with the names of the servers used for .Mac email addresses.

A widget-related quibble: no focus boxes around the edit fields in the first-account setup wizard sheet as you tab between them. In addition, the text input carat keeps flashing even after you click past the “Name this account” panel, and are at the summary panel with the Done button. This isn’t TB-specific, though, it happens in various places in Firefox too.

I would like to be able to use the Keychain to save my passwords.

The next thing I did was right-click the toolbar in the main window to do some customization Um, there’s like nothing in this window. Ah, stuff disappears if it’s already in the toolbar. Pretty sure that’s not how it works in standard Mac apps.

Also, ever time I make a change to the toolbar, the Customize Toolbar window moves to the center of my screen, more or less. That’s really annoying.

OK, I’m going to try to configure one of my huge IMAP accounts now, and we’ll see how it goes…

I love when my work lets me do a variety of stuff.

Today I worked on user docs (not so much love there, but it was some variety). Then I worked on my nsISessionStore sample, which is oh-so-close to done. Then more user doc touch-up work. Then did some JavaScript testing, followed by a revision to the JS 1.7 doc for Firefox 2.

That’s my idea of a good day’s work.

Now I feel like sleeping for 12-14 hours though…

Down to just the nsISessionStore sample to finish up and as far as I’m concerned, the developer docs for Firefox 2 are finished. The sample program is about 90% done now, just trying to figure out a couple of last details so I can wrap it up, write some text explaining how it works, and add it to the article.

Just as I was feeling a heady sense of accomplishment on that, I found myself drawn into the seedy world of twiddling user docs the last couple of days. It’s a very different kind of writing, and requires something of a gear shift. Fortunately it turned out that others did most of the real writing and I just needed to put together a patch and keep my eyes out and make sure any future updates that are needed get done to drive it for Firefox 2.

Hopefully we’ll find someone else whose job it will be for Firefox 3, since user docs really aren’t my specialty. I just submitted a patch to hopefully bring the Firefox 2 docs all up to date (Waldo did most of the work though — I just put some polish on, and not much at that since it was already pretty shiny when I got my mitts on it).

It’s not easy writing user docs, especially when it’s about code you didn’t write yourself.

I’ve still got a lengthy list of stuff to work on after Firefox 2 is done. That’s the best part about a dynamic project like this — there’s always work to be done. Not just with new stuff, but even bringing older material up to snuff.

The list of things that I know of that need to be done to get the Firefox 2 developer docs to the point at which I’ll consider them finished has gotten short enough now that I’ve added the things remaining to be done to my iCal to-do list in order to ensure I don’t miss anything.

I’m going to list them all here, so that if anyone sees anything missing from the list, they can correct me:

1. Need to flesh out the section on destructuring assignment in New in JavaScript 1.7. It’s adequate but I’m unsatisfied with it.
2. Need to write and post some sample code on using the nsISessionStore interface.
3. There are two image files in the default theme for Firefox 2 that the document Theme changes in Firefox 2 doesn’t have complete explanations of since I’ve yet to figure out certain details about how they’re used. I’ve got email out to the right people to get answers, so this should resolve itself soonish.

To my knowledge, that’s it. Everything else is, as far as I can tell, all wrapped up. Odds are very good I can be done with that this week, which just leaves whatever revisions might crop up due to the nearly inevitable last-second email from someone saying something’s all wrong.

If you know anything about any of these topics, feel free to pitch in by reviewing the documentation, editing anything that’s incorrect, or just letting me know of any concerns you have. If there’s anything that’s not as clear as you think it could be, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email!