Status of the "Compose in a tab" experiment

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
_______________________________________________
dev-apps-thunderbird mailing list
dev-apps-thunderbird@...
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-apps-thunderbird