March 31, 2003
Initial Minotaur Review
I've been using an unofficial build of Minotaur since early last week. An official build for Windows was released today. While keeping in mind this is a pre 0.1 build, here are some of my initial thoughts:
- Minotaur is mostly equivalent to recent builds of Mozilla Mail, except, you know, it's stand-alone.
- Links actually open in your default browser! Finally I can click a link and it'll open in Phoenix instead of having to copy/pasting the URL.
- You can customize the toolbar. Not many options as of yet. The Show by icons or "icons and text" feature doesn't work yet. Neither does the Spellchecker. You also can't right click on toolbar and select "customize" yet. To customize toolbars, go View | Toolbars | Customize.
- Prefs have been cleaned up a bit. I think they can be optimized even further, but its at least a start.
- The menu system has been simplified as well.
The Minotaur icons:
They look OK. Maybe a little rough around the edges.
The new mail alert:
- "Compose" is now "Write", although it still says "Compose: " in the title bar.
- Address Book import doesn't work yet.
- Only the Classic theme works.
- Minotaur uses the Mozilla profile location for now instead of it's own like Phoenix. So you can't open Mozilla Mail and minotaur side by side if they're using the same profile. You'll get a "profile is in use" error message. You'll get the same problem if you're using Mozilla as your default web browser.
- Minotaur seems to use less memory than just running Mozilla Mail alone. I've been memory usage periodically throughout the day, sometimes its at 22 megs, sometimes it goes down to 9 or 12. Mozilla Mail consistently stays at 24 megs or so.
March 26, 2003
How to keep two Mozilla profiles in Sync
Getting tired of waiting for the roaming profile bug to be looked into, Henrik Gemal has written a tutorial with a creative solution to the problem of how to keep two Mozilla profiles in sync.
I love Mozilla and use it both at home and at work. So I have my bookmarks, newsgroups, cookie permissions, address book, etc on two different PCs. So adding an bookmark at work means that you cant see it home and reading a newsgroup posting at home means that it is unread at work. This is very annoying!
That’s why I decided to get some kind of synchronization going. I wanted to be able to keep the two Mozilla profiles, the one at home and the one at work, in sync.
The procedure looks a little difficult to setup at first, but it should do the trick.
March 25, 2003
Phoenix 0.6 Now Due In April
According to the Phoenix Roadmap, Phoenix 0.6 is now due in April.
Note that the original target was January, but it has been delayed because of several reasons, one of them being the need to change the name of the browser.
Tools | Options
Another thing that I just noticed in the latest Phoenix build is how the Preferences dialog have been significantly overhauled. Click here to see a screenshot.
First off it's called Tools | Options now. The left tree control has been replaced with fancy new icons. I never really had a problem with the old prefs dialog box, but its easy to see how it would be overwhelming to the average user.
Smooth Scrolling
Reader Mark Slater writes in to tell us that according to Bug 174049, smooth scrolling has been implemented into the latest Mozilla/Phoenix builds. Now when you use the scrollwheel or the Page Up/Page Down keys, the scrollbar moves up and down smoothly instead of "chunk-by-chunk". It can be switched on by adding
user_pref("general.smoothScroll", true); to your user.js pref file.
March 24, 2003
Minotaur Lives!
It's an early Christmas for me this year. Minotaur has been officially launched!
The news came from a post to the mozilla-mail newsgroup
There are no official builds yet, but they should be available in the next few days. For more information, check out the main Minotaur page, which has been updated with more project information.
March 18, 2003
Tracking the progress of Minotaur
It looks like Minotaur is back on track again. Thanks to Scott McGregor, Minotaur may see the light of day soon.
Progress seems to be going along pretty well according to Asa and if you want to follow the what appears to be a tracking bug for Minotaur, look here
Update:
Further proof that Minotaur is back on track:
backdrop.net has added Minotaur branch tracking back to it's excellent Bonsai Bug viewer
March 13, 2003
Mozilla 1.3 Released
Woohoo! Mozilla 1.3 has been released. I've been highly anticipating this release for quite some time now.
Read the release notes and download now!
March 05, 2003
Safari vs. Camino
Mr. Zeldman has compiled a list of some of the web design issues that arise between Safari and Camino (formerly Chimera) on the Mac. As he mentions, "The topic of browser differences is as interesting as lint. But as web designers, we need to know about these differences in the same way that photographers need to know about lenses, lights, and film."
It should be noted that both Safari and Camino are still pre 1.0 releases and still very much beta.
Turn Any <textarea> into a WYSIWYG editor
Interactivetools.com has released an alpha version of their free htmlArea product which is now Mozilla compatible.
If you're using Mozilla 1.3beta+, you can see a demo of it here.
You need Mozilla 1.3 Beta for this to work. It will not work in earlier mozilla version. It doesn't work in Phoenix either (even the latest nightlies). So I assume the script is actively checking for Moz 1.3b, since the latest builds of Phoenix should support it since they would also have the fix in for Bug 88049 - Support .selectionStart & friends for textareas.
March 04, 2003
Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App
Matthew Haughey has written an essay called Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App, showcasing Mozilla's useful features for bloggers who are not yet Mozilla converts.