Thunderbird's Extreme Mac-over

Thunderbird theme before and after

After the Pinstripe theme landed in Firebird, icon designer Stephen Horlander and I dove in to a companion Thunderbird theme. We started in early November 2003 and finally hit the “let’s stop fiddling with it and get it out there” phase in March of 2004. I’ve gone through the messages that Stephen and I exchanged during that time and pulled out a few examples of design decisions.
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Our little 'bird is all grown up

When I started using Thunderbird, I must admit that I had to force myself. Stephen Horlander and I were creating the Pinstripe theme and I was happily using Apple’s Mail program. A year ago Thunderbird felt unfinished (I can hear you say “duh”), but I needed that dogfood taste to inform the design of Pinstripe.

At first I found it hard to get around the “Netscape Messenger 4” feel of Thunderbird. I wish that the UI had been burnt down and redesigned from the ground up as Firefox was. There seem to be many opportunities for simplification in the menus, preferences and settings windows. Perhaps this is coming.

Recently a raft of really useful features have been added like saved search folders (aka virtual folders), RSS feed reading, and message grouping. As we approach Thunderbird 1.0, despite the “legacy” feel of the UI, I find myself really liking Thunderbird instead of merely tolerating it.

Apologies to Scott MacGregor, but this is meant as a sincere compliment 🙂

Thunderbird 0.6! Screenshots inside!

The 0.6 version of Thunderbird, the open source email and news reader from Mozilla.org, was released today. This is the first release to feature the Pinstripe theme and Jon Hicks’ spiffy new icon art. Mac users will also appreciate the new mail notification badge in the dock. Try it out! Keep in mind that this is beta software, but it has come a long way since the last release.

Here are some screenshots:

Main Window, classic view
Main Window, vertical view
Message window
Compose window
Junk Mail controls
Preferences window

Pinstripe Thunderbird has landed!

I’m proud to announce that Pinstripe has become the new default theme on the Mac version of Mozilla Thunderbird. The theme is a collaboration between myself and designer Stephen Horlander that attempts to make Thunderbird feel right at home on the Mac desktop.

Here’s a picture of the theme in action. You can try it yourself by downloading the latest nightly build (11MB gzipped disk image).

Thanks to Scott MacGregor for his help and patience.

Coming Soon: a version of Pinstripe for the Mozilla Suite