The Rumbling Edge

Following a period of hiatus due in part to the Taiwan quake which took down communications across Asia, I am pleased to announce that connections in my area now have been largely restored, allowing me to resume work on The Rumbling Edge.

Some activities that took place over these few weeks:

• Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1 shipped on 12 December 2006. Feedback is being collected here.
• "Beta 1 is offered in en-US (locale) only. It will have support via automatic software update to beta 2."
• Thunderbird 1.5.0.9 shipped on 19 December 2006.

Future expected events:

• At the time of writing, there have been around 39,700,000 Thunderbird downloads. It is expected to cross the 40 million mark in less than a week.
• The 2.0 Beta 2 freeze is occurring this week or the next. The ETA for 2.0 Beta 2 is hopefully a week or two after that. Thunderbird 2 final release (hopefully) ships in February.
• The 1.5.0.10 freeze is happening tomorrow, 18th January 2007. The tentative release date for 1.5.0.10 is set for 1st February following the release of Windows Vista.
• Sunbird 0.5 development is going on as planned, with lots of (potential) new features to be expected. Automatic nightly update functionality has also been added to Sunbird trunk builds, while Mac nightly builds are now universal binaries

Several reviews of Thunderbird 2.0 Beta 1:

1. InformationWeek: "Thunderbird was a great e-mail client to start with, and this new version includes improvements that make it even better."
2. Linux.com: "The beta seems reliable enough for production use, so if you're not happy with your current mailer, or if you use Thunderbird now, back up your mail and give Thunderbird 2.0 beta 1 a shot."
3. DesktopLinux.com: "The Thunderbird email client doesn't get half the attention that its big brother, the Firefox browser, gets, but the Mozilla Foundation has finally gotten around to lavishing some love on it, and the first beta of version 2 is now out."
4. eWeek.com: "The first beta of the Thunderbird 2.0 e-mail client suggests that Mozilla is focusing on improving organization and navigation."