Personal Information Manager & Mail client Spicebird has finally emerged from beta with the release of version 0.8 and, form hereon in, the development team will “continue to update Spicebird every couple of months” Spicebird developer Abhishek Dastidar has informed us.
Spicebird, based on the popular Mozilla PIM application Thunderbird, not only makes use of the stability offered by latest Thunderbird release but also adds refinements to the various features that make Spicebird ‘Spicebird’.
Users will find 0.8 has resolved issues with Instant Messaging, the calendar has received due improvements, full indexing of messages makes searching across accounts easier and support for advanced filtering. The UI of the latest Spicebird also remains consistent with the previous version “so users don’t feel uncomfortable with the changes.”
On dropping the beta tag & adding Messaging Menu integration
On dropping the Beta tag Synovel’s Abhishek Dastidar told me: “We made some stable progress in the IM section which was kind of unstable in the 0.7 series. Also, 0.7 was based on TB3Beta3 series which is why we chose to retain the beta tag. Lastly, we did some fixes to the lightning/Calendaring code to make “it work” with real calendaring servers.
I also took the time to ask Abhishek whether adding support for an Indicator Applets or integration with the Ubuntu Messaging Menu was on the cards: –
“Such an indicator would have to be designed at the platform level. The current code is based on mozilla 191 which has sparse support. As we sync our code to mozilla 192(TB3.1) and later; you can expect gnome specific changes. As far as Ubuntu Menus are concerned, I am packaging them in my PPA with spicebird-gnome-support.”
Download
Spicebird 0.8 rock up in the official Spicebird PPA very shortly, in the mean time – for th impatient – you can download version 0.8 from the Spicebird website as a .tar.gz file.