Thunderbird Home Tab

[Jonathan Protzenko]

TL;DR

I've been thinking about the web tabs and the rss dashboard experiments. I think a very nice project could be a Thunderbird home tab, just like the Firefox home tab. It could unify web tabs, rss dashboard, and possibly other information, into a single page that's your entry point into Thunderbird, and that also gives you an overview of everything that happens in your Thunderbird. Plus, it could provide a consistent experience between Firefox and Thunderbird.

Rationale

Alex Faaborg has been talking recently about the Firefox home tab <http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2011/04/13/the-firefox-home-tab/> that he envisions for Firefox 6. He wants it to store various pieces of information: people, websites, history, bookmarks, tabs and tabs groups... I'm stricken by how useful that could be for Thunderbird as well. Think about the various types of actions you do with Thunderbird:
- check new mail,
- check rss feeds,
- tweak account settings,
- email people,
- open web apps into Thunderbird tabs,
- etc. etc.

All these actions match what Alex describes in his blog post, and I think we could display each one of these items into a Thunderbird home tab that's your entry point for Thunderbird. It would allow you to:
- have a widget that displays most recent emails,
- have a widget that displays most recent RSS feeds,
- have an area that allows you to customize settings for each one of your accounts,
- have an area with your favorite contacts,
- have an area that allows you to open web apps such as Facebook and Twitter as Thunderbird tabs,
- etc. etc.

(Each one of the bullet points above is supposed to match the corresponding bullet point from the first list). It would look like a Firefox app tab, glow when something new happens, etc. etc. Alex's home tab is constantly open and appears leftmost in the Firefox tab bar. I think that's something that could prove relevant for Thunderbird as well. Various UI items are not discoverable easily (think account settings vs. general settings), and I think it could provide a great starting point for all your Thunderbird-related actions.

Mockup

As a proof of concept, and just for RSS Feeds, I've uploaded my RSS Dashboard experiment to AMO <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/rss-tab/>. It's braindead simple, and works minimally, but I just wanted to show that we could build cool stuff with just a few lines of JS in Thunderbird. If that were ever to happen, we could reuse the code from the RSS Dashboard, and from Webtabs, to create a great experiment.

If anyone stands interested, I'd love to implement this and devote some time to this, as I believe it's highly valuable. However, the catch is I'm pretty bad at design and UX. Therefore, I don't know who's the right person to ping for this. With Mozilla Messaging now being reintegrated into Mozilla,
- can we expect Firefox UX people to be interested in contributing to this?
- can we expect Bryan and Andy to be interested in this, or are they going to be more focused on F1-related stuff, and not available for Thunderbird work?

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this! Do you think it is a good direction? Do you think I would be wasting my time?

Have a nice Sunday all,

jonathan

[Jonathan Protzenko]

(replying to the list).

I'm not sure if the Chrome UI is relevant in our case, since we have
different kinds of information, but that sure would be a good starting
point. I'd be happy to reuse any mockup the Firefox UX team has :-).

On Sun 17 Apr 2011 07:39:00 PM CEST, Rafael Ebron wrote:
> This is cool. Looks worthwhile to me. If we can get Twitter/Facebook as
> an account type too than this with RSS feeds would be pretty neat. For
> now, I would recommend mimicking the Chrome UI/UE for their apps/most
> visited/home screen but I suspect Faaborg has some stuff too.
>
> -Rafael

>> catch is I'm *pretty bad at design and UX*. Therefore, I don't know

>> who's the right person to ping for this. With Mozilla Messaging now
>> being reintegrated into Mozilla,
>> - can we expect Firefox UX people to be interested in contributing to
>> this?
>> - can we expect Bryan and Andy to be interested in this, or are they
>> going to be more focused on F1-related stuff, and not available for
>> Thunderbird work?
>>
>> I'd love to hear your thoughts about this! Do you think it is a good
>> direction? Do you think I would be wasting my time?
>>
>> Have a nice Sunday all,
>>
>> jonathan
>>
>>

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>> tb-planning mailing list
>> tb-pl...@mozilla.org
>> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/tb-planning
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[Jim]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Jonathan Protzenko
<jonathan....@gmail.com> wrote:
> TL;DR
>
> I've been thinking about the web tabs and the rss dashboard experiments. I
> think a very nice project could be a Thunderbird home tab, just like the
> Firefox home tab. It could unify web tabs, rss dashboard, and possibly other
> information, into a single page that's your entry point into Thunderbird,
> and that also gives you an overview of everything that happens in your
> Thunderbird. Plus, it could provide a consistent experience between Firefox
> and Thunderbird.

Excellent! I was thinking about this too. The home tab seems like the
next logical step in the progression from thread summaries to folder
summaries to account summaries. :) This would also be a great place
for extensions (e.g. Lightning) to hook into to provide a summary of
their info (e.g. upcoming events/tasks). In fact, for Lightning, you
could probably use the home tab to replace the Today Pane entirely.

It's been a really long time since I used it, but I recall that MS
Outlook had something vaguely like this. Apparently it's called
"Outlook Today" and looks like this:
<http://www.theworldofoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/using-2dmicrosoft-2doutlook-2dpic1-small.jpg>

- Jim

[Siddharth Agarwal]

On 17-04-2011 21:56, Jonathan Protzenko wrote:

TL;DR

I've been thinking about the web tabs and the rss dashboard experiments. I think a very nice project could be a Thunderbird home tab, just like the Firefox home tab. It could unify web tabs, rss dashboard, and possibly other information, into a single page that's your entry point into Thunderbird, and that also gives you an overview of everything that happens in your Thunderbird. Plus, it could provide a consistent experience between Firefox and Thunderbird.

Yeah. I don't have any time at the moment to work on it, but this is something I'm planning to work on in the summer. This is definitely a feature that'll be really useful for a lot of people, and also neatly solve a bunch of UI inconsistencies that Thunderbird's tab implementation currently has (first tab being permanent etc).

Sid

[Bryan Clark]

I think this is a great idea.

I did a mockup for this a while back but I can't seem to find it now.  It wasn't much but just started in the direction you're talking about.  http://cl.ly/150M3p0f3t3S2W09323D

Create a home tab which is always available and instead of requiring a 3 pane window to always be open it's the home tab that is required.  This has a number of great improvements to the over all system. 

* Instead of showing a 3 pane like tab (using an empty account page) when Thunderbird is being setup we show the home tab
* The only tab that can't be closed is the home tab instead of the 3 pane window.  The home tab helps you launch other tabs like the 3 pane tab or add-on provided tabs.
* Opening mail in new windows simply becomes opening TB in a new window with a message reader tab and the home tab (likely the tab row is hidden in this case); which avoids all the duplicate code of the current separate window

I'd love to help where I can.  I'd say just get started on something very simple and build from there.  Currently AFAIK much of TB is expecting a 3 pane running at all times so you'll likely hit most of your issues there.

~ Bryan

[Mark Banner]

On 18/04/2011 00:02, Bryan Clark wrote:

Create a home tab which is always available and instead of requiring a 3 pane window to always be open it's the home tab that is required.  This has a number of great improvements to the over all system. 

* Instead of showing a 3 pane like tab (using an empty account page) when Thunderbird is being setup we show the home tab
* The only tab that can't be closed is the home tab instead of the 3 pane window.  The home tab helps you launch other tabs like the 3 pane tab or add-on provided tabs.
* Opening mail in new windows simply becomes opening TB in a new window with a message reader tab and the home tab (likely the tab row is hidden in this case); which avoids all the duplicate code of the current separate window

I'd love to help where I can.  I'd say just get started on something very simple and build from there.  Currently AFAIK much of TB is expecting a 3 pane running at all times so you'll likely hit most of your issues there.

I'm for this, but I'd strongly recommend splitting this up into several bits of work:

1. Implementing the home tab and whatever goes in it.
2. Allowing the 3-pane tab to be closed
3. Replacing the standalone message reader with the "main" window.

1 and 2 can probably be implemented side by side if there's a skeleton implementation for a tab that always stays open. Closing the 3-pane tab is likely to be complicated as I believe there is a lot of code which assumes the existence of the various panes, but finding out exactly what, and getting it cleaned up would be a good gain IMO.

Mark.