Mozilla Thunderbird Project follow up

07Dec09

Onwards to 0.3

Ok, so the semester is nearing an end and the multitude of intense courses this semester has been hitting me to the ground…. but I shake off the dirt from my clothes, get my composure… and keep pushing forward.  So where are things at and where are they going.

Blogs for my project
0.2 Release
Detecting Window Panes
0.1 Release
…

I have a problem

The first realization… I’m a perfectionist… well, its possible and likely… but more importantly, I’ve found myself and received feedback from people that I program by playing it safe by doing a lot of planning.  Whereas those that gave me the feedback attributed their own programming style to be more like a bull in a china shop.  How does this relate?

I tend to plan my approach a lot and I like to know what I’m doing.  The plan isn’t such a bad idea and I’ll note it next.  The whole “knowing what I’m doing” thing, just isn’t going to happen while I’m in school…. hell, that won’t even happen while I’m on the job.  It’ll happen after a project is done… and then I’ll move onto the next project and the learning starts all over.

What improves, and what I’m improving at, is my general understanding of programming and development work.  So I suppose the problem is not so much not knowing what I’m doing… but ensuring that I’m trying things without being so  concerned whether its going to work perfectly the first time.  Now that I’m on the crunch of the semester end… this type of approach IS A MUST!

My Plan

• Fix the scrolling of the message pane so that it does a full scroll top/bottom and not paging.
• create an extension to override the default behaviour (of course this will require sweetening up the current code that’s in place)
  • getting preferences configured so that the flow of the code is streamlined enough it can be capture for multiple events from a single point.
  • get familiar with extensions in Thunderbird, particularly for capturing user multi-touch events. (Nadim is aiding with this via blogging right now)
  • build the extension and cleaned up code and submit a patch and post on progress.

There is much learning to be done here.  So for now, the trick will be to get the learning accomplished and get coding as I figure things out.  Even if it means a change in the code could break the whole thing.  Just dig in!

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