Thunderbird Multi-touch 0.2 Release

20Nov09

Well after much fussing about with porting a bug fix that was intended for Firefox in dealing with multi-touch scrolling issues into Thunderbird, I resolved the process and now have 3 finger swipe scrolling. In the end, the final fix was removing a shortcut of “Ci” that was used in Firefox code to represent “Components.interfaces”.

My patch is posted here, and a sample package of Thunderbird for Mac with my patch in place is here.

After an excellent introduction to components and their idl interfaces in class today, this fix was almost simple. In turn, this got the function that a firefox developer came up with which was to scroll a window by synthesizing a mouse scroll event.

Previously I had found a way to isolate out the 3 different panes in the Thunderbird main window…. being: Folder pane, Message thread pane, and the Message pane. In the end this wasn’t necessary, but it may come in handy for other custom actions.

Currently, preferences for these events aren’t propagating through Thunderbird properly and I have to learn the preferences system in Thunderbird to get it in use. I imagine this will help to slim out the code and ensure better integration for extension/add-on capabilities for customizing the multi-touch behaviors.

There also seems to be a change in the behaviour of the synthensized mouse event that I am calling. Since updating my revisions, the forced scroll behaviour now only seems to do a pageUp/pageDown event instead of a full scroll Top/Bottom. I will need to investigate and maybe explicitly synthesize pageTop/pageBottom key strokes.