Simple like me...

After my post about the new RSS capabilities in Mozilla Thunderbird, I started looking into the possibility of actually building a podcasting extension for Thunderbird. It turns out that both Thunderbird and Firefox are built on XUL, which is like XML for interfaces, and Javascript, which is pretty amazing, if you think about it.

What this means is that it's pretty easy (once you get your head round the actual programming side) for anyone to put together extensions to the Mozilla programs. Not only that, but using the just-announced Mozilla Prism, it will be very easy to turn any Firefox/Thunderbird extension into a standalone program, and make use of local file storage.

I've been having a play around with the XUL coding, and it seems immensely powerful, and more than enough for most basic data-driven desktop applications - I can't understand why more companies have not used this already to create programs and data-driven websites that act like programs on the users local machine, but from what I can see so far, for my podcasting app it should be more than enough for what I need, for playing MP3s and videos I can use flash, so it should be a pretty good all-round program.

Now to get back to re-learning Javascript!

Thunderbirds are go!

After seeing the Zune software fall a bit short of the mark with podcasting, I've been playing about with the Pre-Alpha version of Thunderbird 3, Mozilla's email client. I respect Mozilla as a software company (if you can call them that, how much money do they actually make from selling software?) because they're innovative, but what they do works, and works well. Probably due to the fact that being an open-software company, each piece of software is like a forum of ideas, unlike Microsoft these days ;)

Even though this is a pre-alpha release, it's been working for me with no problems so far (more than can be said for some companies' final releases, not mentioning any names). One thing that is really looking good, even at this early stage in the game, is the RSS reader capability, which lets you see your RSS feeds alongside your inbox - why has nobody done this before now? (OK, I know you can get extensions for Outlook to do this, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft should have added this functionality a long time ago). When you click a post, the actual link back to the site hosting the article is opened within a Thunderbird pane, which means no more clicking "read..." links! The really surprising thing though, was how well this all worked with podcasts - the audio/video file in the enclosure just shows up as an attachment to the post, allowing you to just save it where you want on your computer. Elegant, and all you really need from something not designed specifically for podcasting. I'm sure at some point Mozilla will add some basic mp3 player functionality so you can preview episodes and play them back once downloaded, or perhaps automatically generate a playlist within Media Player/iTunes with all the received episodes from a certain podcast. I'm just throwing ideas around. Of course because it's built by Mozilla, it has the Firefox rendering engine built into it, meaning that podcasts can take advantage of full HTML formatting in the description.

Now all somebody needs to do is build a podcast directory that bolts into Thunderbird, and there's the beginnings of some fairly decent podcasting software finally!

I <3 Gmail

My love for Gmail continues to grow... they've finally implemented something that I've been wanting for a long time: IMAP support. After a couple of days of knowing that it was 'out there', but only activated on a few accounts, they activated it on my account yesterday, and I'm a very happy bunny :)

IMAP is basically like syncronizing your iPod with iTunes, except with your email - so I can now use a proper mail program like Mozilla Thunderbird, and have everything I do in the mail program stay completely in sync with how it will be if I log into Gmail through the webmail interface like normal. So for example, if I delete a message from my inbox in Thunderbird, it will be deleted when I log into Gmail as well!

Now what would really be useful is if somebody were to make an add-in for Thunderbird that would keep your address book synchronized as well!