Thunderbird takes flight

Okay, Thunderbird 1.0 was released 3 days ago. I haven't get it yet. I am a Firefox fan, but not necessarily a Thunderbird fan, yet. Sadly speaking, I am still using Outlook Express. That might explain why I haven't create a Phoenity theme for Thunderbird. Chris Neale is the one who volunteers to port my icons to this application, though he's quite busy now, I think. The good news is I will migrate soon, since this Outlook Express crap is messing up my life. Another good news is I will be taking over the work and try my best to produce an official Phoenity theme for Thunderbird soon.

Just now, I was surprised to see a huge Thunderbird logo on the front cover of The Star In.Tech newspaper. It features an article written by a local author named Ahmad Sayuthi. I'm not sure when he wrote this, but the version he used is 0.9, not 1.0. It was a good read till I noticed these sentences printed on the paper, page 17:

The developers have obviously done a lot of research in planning and developing this program. They have apparently studied Opera's success in separating itself from the competition. They are emulating Opera's practice of providing flexibility and versatility with their product. And that is in adopting the Scandinavian way of placing more importance on what the customer wants.

In the context of software development, that means giving the user tools to make the program look and behave the way that he wants. Now, that is a real savvy move which endears the program to its user, much like the Opera browser.

Huh? Is this true? I thought it's the Opera guys following Mozilla's path. And what does Opera, an application suite, got to do with Thunderbird which is a stand-alone email client? I don't mean to offend any Opera fans or developers, but I hope someone could please enlighten me on this.

Posted over 6 years ago, on Thursday, 9 December 2004

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