I’ve recently got a few comments from a visitor saying “hurry up and release the f**king theme” and “do your f**king job.”

Now I know that there is bound to be one jerk out of hundreds of users, but it’s comments like these that make me wonder why I continue to spend my time on themes.  It’s not my job and, the more negative comments I get, the slower my progress will be.  These things take hours to build and there is a lot to take into consideration.

On the other hand I’ve gotten a lot of comments recently about people who are so passionate about Miint that they’d switch back to Firefox 2 until it was ready for Firefox 3.  These kind of comments drive me.  They are not yelling at me but encouraging me to spend more time theming.  And the good news is, Miint for Firefox 3 has come along way in just two and a half hours.

What I’m trying to point out here is that when you don’t pay for something, you should not demand updates and start swearing at developers.  We do this because we want to, because we love to, not because we have to.

Give a little respect to those that create free addons, themes and free software in general.

Currently iV is in beta mode and this is the first public release. Seeing as I’ve never themed Thunderbird before, there are a lot of issues. It’s funny, I can now create a sweet Firefox theme in just a few hours, but with Thunderbird, I’m fumbling left and right.

iV beta 1 includes all toolbar buttons, basic Lighting support (it works), custom buttons, folders and all sorts of icons.

This all started when Vitae was released. It’s a very beautiful Mac theme that impressed me so I decided to create a Thunderbird theme to match. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as good. However, it is a decent start and I’ve been using it for a few weeks with only a few oddities.

The beta warnings.

• It’s only been tested on the Mac. Let me know if others have success.
• It’s not complete, but it works.

Feel free to report bugs below and I’ll try and squash them as I find them.

Without further ado, download iV beta 1.

To install, you must first download the theme. If you are in Firefox, you may need to right click on the link above and save it to your desktop. Then open Thunderbrid and go to Tools -> Addons. Click on the Install button and choose iV-Beta1.jar. Don’t forget to activate the theme too.