Leslie Franke

Songbird, a free skinable media player capable of playing all types of music formats has recently been released. It comes with links to stores like eMusic and mp3Tunes, as well as various blogs and mp3 aggregators. Think of Songbird has a combination of music player and web browser.

The current release is just a “proof-of-concept” version, a sign of things to come. Thus, it is only available for Windows at the moment (Linux and Mac OSX versions to come). In addition, there are a lot of features, such as cross fading and CD import and burn, that are not present. One of the things that makes Songbird exciting, though, is that it has been built off of Mozilla Firefox and was created using XUL allowing Songbird to work with third party extensions. This is a good sign for future flexibility and features.

While Songbird is not ready for prime time, I am looking forward to seeing what how Songbird develops. The first version has a tendency to crash occasionally and lacks many of the more advanced features of an iTunes or other compeititors. Songbird may very well be a sign of things to come, a “web browser for music”.

Like the Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet, this one page cheat sheet brings together Mozilla Thunderbirds’s keyboard & mouse shortcuts, a few tips & tricks, and where to find things in Thunderbird, onto one simple to view page.

• PDF format
• HTML format

As mentioned earlier, Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 has been released and I would recommend the product to anyone. A word of caution when installing the new version of Thunderbird if you have an existing version on your system. Nasty things can happen, as has been documented on the MozillaZine Forum, if you just to an install of the new version into the same directory as the old one.

Below are the simple steps I took to succesfully upgrade to Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.

1. Ran a backup of my Thunderbird Profile. You can find the folder location for your operating system here.

2. Uninstalled my previous version of Thunderbird.

3. Installed a clean version of Thunderbird 1.5

This procedure is simple to do but is a complete lack of communication on the part of Mozilla. If you read way down into the release notes you will find a line that says, “Prior to installing Thunderbird 1.5, please ensure that the directory you’ve chosen to install into is clean and doesn’t contain any previous Thunderbird installations.” It is not part of the Windows instructions on the release page on how to install Thunderbird nor is any warning mentioned if you just do a download of Thunderbird from the product’s page (as most users will do).

Hopefully, with the new software update tool that automatically downloads updates in the background, this problem will not occur again. Never the less it is little things like this that could prevent Thunderbird from reaching the critical masses.

You can now have Firefox style tabs for in Mozilla Thunderbird when viewing messages. The feature allows a user to right-click on a message header and select “Open Message in New Tab” from the context menu. Developed by Myk Melez, these Thunderbird builds are avaliable at his blog.

OpenOffice 2.0, a free alternative to Microsoft Office, has just been released. Open Office features a Word compatible word processor, a Excel compatible spread sheet program, and a Power Point like presentation software. Two nice features in OpenOffice are the ability to create PDF and Flash files. The main drawback to OpenOffice still seems to be it is slower than Microsoft Office when opening and saving documents.

Note: For those Palm users out there remember if you want to ability to save files as DOC files you need to do an custom install. When the program asks for a list of features to install find the section labeled mobile device filters and under Palm click on the drop down box selecting ‘this feature, and all sub features, will be installed on local hard drive’.

Check out the interview with Lightning developer Mike Shaver. It looks like Palm syncing will not be available in version 1.0, due this summer. The good news is, though, “Michiel van Leeuwen (mvl) and Dan Mosedale (dmose) have been working hard on it, though, and have made sure that sync issues have been considered at all points in our architecture decisions, so I’m hopeful that we’ll end up with a very good sync story when the time comes”.

Lightning is the project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (see Outlook) into Thunderbird.

Google Desktop Search is now out of beta. It allows you to use Google technology to search files on your hard disk including new support for Mozilla programs, including the Firefox and Thunderbird programs. It can also now index PDF files, music and images. The neat thing is that developers can now use plugins to include their software in the search. Plugins are already available Trillian and OpenOffice.org.