Status of the "Compose in a tab" experiment

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Compose in a tab is a Mozilla Messaging experiment that bundles an HTML editor called CKEditor, and builds a totally new composition UI, that incidentally also happens to live in a tab.

Previously, on Mozilla Messaging
--------------------------------

A while ago, I blogged about a "Compose in a tab" experiment [1]. Since then, I've focused on the development of Thunderbird Conversations [2]. However, I've recently resumed development on "Compose in a tab". It has now reached a state which I would qualify as "barely usable". I've submitted a new version to AMO [3], and I will be uploading dev builds at [4] until a stable version is released again. Right now, [3] and [4] only have one version. I've submitted this new version to AMO so that the page listing the addon doesn't disappear. Dev builds will be released on [4] only.


Current state of affairs
------------------------

"Barely usable" means that some people might be willing to use this addon in its current state (full disclosure: I am not, but I hope to soon).
- Composing a new message, editing a draft, replying to all, to list, forwarding inline and as attachments, all work.
- Adding attachments works.
- Sending mixed emails (plaintext+html) works, and html will be used if and only if there's extra formatting that will be lost when sending in plaintext only (this is standard Thunderbird behavior).
- Contacts for Thunderbird is not required anymore.
- You won't be prompted for confirmation if you close a tab with unsaved contents. Because of a design choice I made, if you were editing a draft, this will leave two copies of the draft in the Drafts folder. This is a bug that is fixed by applying the patch from [6], or waiting for it to land.
- Blockquotes are not broken when hitting <Enter> inside a blockquote. Yes, this is infuriating. This is a bug in CKEditor, see [5]. You might manage to break them by holding shift.
- Other bugs are known: see [7] (for instance, session restore is basically useless right now).
- It's compatible with 3.1 right now, although I'm afraid bug 645552 probably won't make it to a point-release for 3.1. So I'll probably be enforcing compatibility with 3.3 soon. I'm sorry about this, but "Compose in a tab" is so rough that I can't imagine someone interested in using this won't be ok with using 3.3 as well (which, as a side note, is wonderfully stable).


Plans for the future
--------------------

I have a limited amount of manpower, and most of it is currently devoted to Thunderbird Conversations, as well as backend work on Thunderbird. It is very likely that I won't be able to invest a significant amount of energy into this experiment, as I'm already using most of my time for Conversations. What this means is I will move this forward to the point where the most painful (and difficult) bugs are fixed. This includes everything that is listed on [7]. After that, I'll probably wait for someone to pick up this experiment and move it forward.

Please allow me to remind here that this experiment is 100% Javascript and HTML. There's no XUL in it. There's some jQuery, as well as some XPCOM stuff that should be abstracted away by the thunderbird-stdlib project that "compose in a tab" now builds upon. I firmly believe that if we use standard technologies, any talented developer can join and give a hand without having the burden of learning XUL and Thunderbird specifics. If anyone feels like contributing, and helping Thunderbird move forward, this would be a very efficient way to achieve this: there's a lot of easy stuff waiting to be picked up there. I'm always willing to help and provide guidance, so anyone interested should probably come over to the #maildev channel and start discussing things. As usual, anyone can track this project on GitHub [8].

Thanks for your attention :-)

jonathan (:protz)

PS: feedback redirected to the mozilla-labs google group

[1] http://mozillalabs.com/messaging/2010/09/03/2756-bugs-found/
[2] http://mozillalabs.com/messaging/2010/12/07/announcing-thunderbird-conversations/
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/compose-for-thunderbird/
[4] http://jonathan.xulforum.org/files/compose-in-a-tab-nightlies/
[5] http://dev.ckeditor.com/ticket/7354#comment:4
[6] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645552
[7] https://github.com/protz/Compose/issues
[8] http://github.com/protz/Compose

[Paul King]

When I use Compose for Thunderbird the 'Send' button doesn't respond.  No reaction.

Two other guys in my office are using it successfully.

The error console gives:

Error: identity is undefined

Source File: resource://kompose/stdlib/send.js

Line: 256

Any ideas welcome.

Paul King

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Hi,

I'm not actively working on this, so I can't really look into this right now. That sounds like you have an identity without an email, or something. Please check your NNTP identities and your other identities in the account settings, to make sure everything's right...

jonathan

[Paul King]

Thanks Jonathan.  I used to use a signature changer so that my have screwed my identity in the background.  Tomorrow I'll un-and-re-install Thunderbird to see if that fixes it.

Thanks again.

Paul K

[PurpleSage]

This is such a fantastic extension!  I don't use it because, as Jonathon said, it's barely useable.  Yes, you can craft messages within a tab but every H%20 (space character) creates an &nbsp in its placeor in addition to the space when an e-mail is sent.  Also, whenever I disable the extension and relaunch TB, the extension auto-re-enables.

I must uninstall it so I can use the original e-mail editor.  I think at one point, there was an option to use the original editor if you right-clicked on an e-mail to which you wanted to respond.  Perhaps that functionality still exists and there's a conflict with another installed extension on my machine.  Anyway, it's not that important for me to experiment with it.

However, the concept has been proven.  The extension works.  I don't understand why Mozilla Messaging doesn't provide more resources to develop it.  I know people have been clamoring for the ability to write and edit e-mails in a tab since Eudora 7 ceased production.

If I were a coder, I'd pick up the ball and run with this.  However, I'm not.  I just wish someone could move this extension forward and make it useable, and then turn it into a kick-ass product.

[Tae-nam Kim]

First of all, Thank you for awsome extension.
However, It have two problems.

1) No put the signature in mail.
2) Can't write a mail contens because interference with Nostalgy(another extension) keboard shortcut. It is due to compose in new tab embeded all another extensions.
Solving suggestion: Open in new window without another extensions when I compose mail.

I hope, this extension grow up to main editor in thunderbird.

[domi 301]

nice jobs

in a later stage this feature will be very usefull too
to personnalize some mails from external data

http://mailtweak.mozdev.org/tweaks.html#personal

Sends each recipient an individual message, using data from your address book or a CSV file.

To use this feature, write a message by choosing: Message – Personalize...   You can address it to a list, or to individuals in your address book. Alternatively, select cards in your address book, then get a context menu (for example, by right-clicking a card) and choose: Personalize  

To use addresses from a CSV file, do not specify any addresses in the message.

To send the message, press the Personalize button or choose: File – Personalize   If the message has no recipients, then MailTweak prompts you to choose a CSV file that specifies the recipients.

MailTweak creates an individual copy of the message for each recipient, regardless of whether the recipient was originally specified using To:, Cc: or Bcc:. The messages are placed in your Unsent folder, so if you wish you can review them before sending them.

To include data from your address book or CSV file, specify fields in your message. For example, if you specify %%firstName%% then the actual message sent will have the recipient's first name in that position in the message.

*** you can use csv column as special fields

In each record of a CSV file, the first field that contains an @ sign is taken to be the e-mail address. Alternatively, set the preference extension.mailtweak.personal.csv.to to the name of the field that contains the e-mail address, changing spaces in the name to underscores.

[Scott Armitage]

Hi all,

I like the concept of moving the compose dialog to a tab, as it makes much more sense within a tabbed workflow. In addition, the built-in compose dialog (Thunderbird 6.0.2) is terrible, and I would love something sleeker to replace it.

Unfortunately, I am not ready to switch to Compose just yet, for a few reasons:

1. The interface is not yet much better than the default dialog; I find the editor far too busy, with too much emphasis on the HTML formatting. I think taking some cues from Google's editor implementations would be beneficial here.
2. As I have found all to common in OSS projects lately, I feel there is too much white space, as well as too many "bubblies".
3. Lack of integration with the built-in address book -- I agree that the address book needs to change as well, but I am not ready to move to two experimental projects simultaneously.

Good work, keep it up! Hopefully we can get something like this branched into main.

-S

[Douglas Shuck]

Hello

I really like Compose 0.2, addresses a number of short falls withing the in standard Thunderbird product in the messaging area.  The only issue that i have experienced is that it apparently disables my spell checker. I use US Spell Checker 5.0.1 and simply won't work as long as Compose is enabled.  Has anyone else experienced this?

Doug

[Jonathan Protzenko]

Hi Douglas and others potentially following this thread,

The compose in a tab experiment is and remains an experiment. I have no
time to invest any more time into it, so please consider it as a dead
project from now on. (There should be a disclaimer for that on the
addon page on addons.mozilla.org)

The goal of that experiment was manifold:
- perform all the composition process with as much as javascript as
possible: most of that work has been recycled for the Thunderbird
Conversations addon and its quick reply feature (which is actively
maintained),
- experiment with another editor for writing html mail: the ckeditor
has been a less than satisfactory one, and I don't think we want to
keep it if we were to do future iterations of this thing,
- implement the compose in a tab feature: since tabs on top just
recently landed on trunk, I'm pretty sure we'll see that fixed in the
upcoming months.

Thanks for your interest! Cheers,

jonathan

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[Jonathan Protzenko]

I'm just saying I think writing emails in a tab will be done in the
upcoming months. I'm in no way making an official statement or anything.

jonathan

On Sat 31 Dec 2011 04:20:29 AM CET, Jared Lane wrote:
> Hi Jonathan,
>
> So in a nutshell, "compose in a tab" will soon be built into TB?

[Andrew Clarke]

I seriously hope so!  Please consider this some added encouragement to make this enhancement...and thanks for all your work so far on a really great product.