Archive for July, 2008
Shredder – Mozilla Thunderbird 3
Posted by Boris in Software and Development on July 13th, 2008
Hi there.
Early this morning, I found mistakes on a french website. No ones cares (even those who did it, maybe), but it was the reason why I decided to get Thunderbird 3 Alpha. Actually, the french dictionary was only available for Thunderbird 3, and I needed it to correct those mistakes, since I have a Qwerty keyboard, and since I’m too lazy to use an International Qwerty Layout. Maybe I’ll get a Dvorak Us Keyboard soon, but it’s not currently the matter.
So, I installed Thunderbird 3 Alpha pre. I didn’t notice any differences with the 2.0 at the first look, excepted about addons. Indeed, not any did work, but adblock plus. Great thing, but I needed at least the “MinimizeToSystray” addon, in order to let Thunderbird to check my mails regularly. And the MinimizeToSystray addon, on the mozilla addons repository, was available for Thuderbird 2 and previous versions only. So, I tried to find how to tell to Thunderbird 3 to accept it. It’s in install.rdf in the xpi archive. The only thing you have to do is to seek for <em:targetApplication> <!-- Mozilla Thunderbird --> and then replace the <em:maxVersion>2</em:maxVersion> in the <Description> section by <em:maxVersion>3.0a2pre</em:maxVersion>. So the package is there, and it works almost perfectly for me (where “almost” means “since you don’t try to run the old Thunderbird”).
Update : I found a bug in the minimize to tray plugin: when you call thunderbird, it’s started twice, and you have to close one instance.
Update #2 : The new version is out, so I updated the xpi in order to get things working.
Update #3 : As requested by Jimmy (see comments), here is the FF3 minimize to tray plugin.
Update #4: As of today, a new version of TB is released, the new unofficial minimize to tray plugin has been, as well.
Update #5: Minimize to tray for Shredder 3.0b3pre.
Final Update: Since I now use a linux distribution, I won’t upload (nor modify) any version of this plugin here.
DeviantArt
Posted by Boris in Miscanelous on July 9th, 2008
I created my deviantart account years ago, to be precise, in the very first part of 2004. Since this time, I hadn’t paid attention to this account, for various reasons. But about two weeks ago, I suddenly realized that this account could be used to show up my work.
And, yeah, that’s enough on me, let’s talk about the website now. The reasons why I though that this website were interesting were the following:
- This website exists since a very long time, and is world wide famous. So, some very interesting advices and tips can be decently expected.
- A lot of great artists are there, at least to improve traffic on their personal website, and the “favorite” feature allow any registered user to easily keep up to date a list of his/her favorites works among the whole community.
- Ajax integration, with a well done design, gives to users a nice experience (even if some bugs still remain), and this, since a long time ago (since Ajax were “explicitly described”, about 2 or 3 years ago).
This website, although it’s not perfect, is very nice, and gathers great artists.
But, despite of this all, and after a short while on deviantART, I observed some behaviors I didn’t like at all. First, users are subjects of a sort of “ladder”, and so, most of them try to reach the best “place” they can. All the exchanges between users I saw were about “the favs”. When you like something, you can “add it to your favorites”, or “fav-it”. And then, the “most-faved” work get the first place, and is of the front page of the site. So people try to get the top of this ranking at any price. It’s really difficult to exchange something, even to have a little chat with another user.
And so, I’ve decided to move my photos on flickr™, because I think that flickr™ is more “sober”, contain less ads, and that I don’t need comments on my photographs, since photography is just a hobby to me. I’ll keep my desktops and all that stuff on DeviantART, just to keep photographs/screen shots separated.
Finally, I saw the new design two days ago: DeviantART v6. I greatly prefered the previous one. And some of the qualities of D/A I mentionned above have disappeared. I’ve not cancelled my account, because I will use it for things like “screenshots” and “Desktops”, and also because It allows me to keep a “fav-list” of what I like on the website. But regadless of this, I’m mostly disappointed about D/A.