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Thunderbird
Trying my hand at a Thunderbird theme.
Just a few days ago I came across Vitae, an amazing Shapeshifter theme. Since I got my new iMac, I haven’t installed Shapeshifter or even thought twice about themes, but now I wanted it. I searched for my serial number and got it installed and it was beautiful. It really is worth a check-out.
Then I thought that it’d be a good Thunderbird theme. You know, something to match Vitae’s Mail.app theme. So I emailed the author and asked permission to use his elements and starting toying around with a Thunderbird theme. Talk about no fun.
The Flavors of Gecko Technology
The number of different applications that use Gecko are ever increasing. What’s Gecko? It’s the rendering engine that powers such programs as Firefox, Thunderbird and many more.
I guess it all starts with Netscape back in 1998 and possibly even before that when Netscape decided to make a technology to power their browser. It’s come a long way and here are a few applications taking advantage of this open source technology.
- Firefox* – The most popular and most wildly used Gecko application. It’s the little web browser that’s trying to change the world. With hundreds of extensions and themes, customizing it to fit your needs is one thing that makes it so popular.
My ‘Best Free Mac Applications’ List
On the Mac, there are some fantastic applications that are completely free. Here is a list of what I believe to be some of the best I’ve found so far.
- Adium – The all in one, completely customizable instant messaging program. It absolutely rocks!
- AOL Radio – I love this because I can get nearly commercial free streaming music from all genres.
- AppFresh* – Only free while in development, AppFresh keeps me up-to-date on what installed programs are not up-to-date.
- Butler – Applications & Folders in the menu bar are so handy. Plus it can do so much more.
Growl Notifications in Thunderbird & Firefox
Today, the folks over at Growl released official extensions for both Thunderbird and Firefox. You can now be alerted when new mail arrives or when downloads complete.
Hosted on ZooomrInstall is extremely simple, just install the extension. That’s it. You can configure how it displays though the main Growl system preference just like any other application. It’s simple and sweet. I’ve been using them both all day and they are a great addition to the Mac platform.
Get Growl for Thunderbird or Firefox!
Make Custom Thunderbird Labels Stand Out
If you followed the Thunderbird Labels modification I put up a few days back, you may have found out that it didn’t work for custom labels/tags. Yes, I knew that, but wanted to start off with the basic labels. Here is a quick tutorial on how to get your custom ones up and running.
What you’ll need to do is add the following lines of code to your CSS file. The code below accounts for one label/tag color, which, in this example, happens to be orange. You can see where the orange color is represented by the orange HEX colors. The lighter orange HEX number is for the background of the un-selected, labeled message.
Sync Google Calendar & Thunderbird
If you’ve upgraded to Thunderbrid 2.0 you can now run the Provider extension that will sync Google Calendar and Thunderbird running the calendar extension.
It’s very easy to setup thanks to bfish.xaedalus.net’s instructions. I tested it out this morning and it worked flawlessly. Ok, maybe one minor issue. It seems that it ‘automagically’ populated my Google username and it wasn’t correct. I had to switch it. But other than that, the directions are dead on and easy to follow.
Thunderbird 2 Launches
I’m a fan of Thunderbird (the free email client) and version 2 was just released today!
Besides performance, security and bug fixes that come with any upgrade, Thunderbird 2 has more labels/tags with better organizing options, multi paned sidebar, universal Mac binary, better Vista support and a Firefox like search bar in each message. I’m sure there is more, but until I can really dig into it and use it for a while, I won’t know.
Make Thunderbird’s Labels Stand Out
I’m a big fan of Thunderbrid, however one of the things that bugs me is that the labels don’t stand out enough. I feel as if they kind of blend into the background. I did a bit of research and figured out how to style the labels to stand out a bit more. Check it out:
To update your labels in Thunderbird follow these simple steps.
What is the Mozilla Sandbox?
With the recent upgrade to the Mozilla Addon’s site, there is now a sandbox. What’s a sandbox you ask? Well it’s where all new addons go before they go live to the public.
The great thing about the sandbox is that once you are in, you can view and install any theme or extension that has been uploaded. There is no waiting for approval which is good news to developers. One can upload their item right away and send users to it.
Official Firefox Addon Tester
I’m now an official AMO (addons.mozilla.org) tester. I volunteered for the job so that I could test themes and help get more of them out to the public faster. So far I’ve done a few themes and a few extensions.
The upside is I get to see all the coolest new addons before anyone else. I can also give direct feedback to the authors in order to help them along. The downside is that there are so many waiting in the wings at times that I wish I could just do them all. Most of the submissions are extensions and I’m not quite up to testing many of them yet as I don’t know what they are suppose to do. I do try and test the ones that sound like something I’d install.
