There’s a number of things I’ve been meaning to blog about recently. Thanks to Andrew, who has been blogging about stuff, people will have hopefully known about the web UI meeting we had recently. While relatively informal, it does feel like everyone wants to move in the same direction: a light-weight reliable UI framework pulling togther useful components to provide a compelling app. We’re going to start with “Flasher”, the UI for non-Bongo users, and I started story boarding some use cases. The key is simplicity as usual, but after a brief look around I realised something – no other free software package is doing this. A few doing something similar, but not this.

I was also interested to read Ten Ways to make OSS More Humane. There’s a lot of stuff in there, but it’s mostly stuff I agree with. In particular, I was quite happy to see that we do most of the “do” statements – I thought it was particularly apropos given the web UI discussions – and hopefully none of the “do not”. We’ve had a few new faces in IRC recently, and they’ve all stuck around: I still think one of our primary strengths is that we’re a really friendly community, and long may that continue.

Somewhat worried to read that David Bienvenu and Scott MacGregor – the driving forces behind Mozilla Thunderbird – are both leaving the Mozilla Foundation. After all the discussion about setting up a new “MailCo” to drive the product in the same way Firefox gets driven, I was hoping for great things. Now, with the very boiler-plate text on both their blogs and both wishing MailCo all the best, it seems they are not to be involved. I really hope I’m wrong, but I would assume that with MailCo on the table they wouldn’t jump to some other Tbird vehicle – so it sounds like they’ll both be reducing their involvement in the project. That’s the last thing Tbird needs, and I wonder if that does spell the end.