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Apr 25

Spicebird: Email, Calendar, IM, RSS, and More

Posted in: Freeware, Mozilla, Pre-Release, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili, videos

This article was written on January 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

There’s a new app on the block, and it looks as though it may have a very promising future. The open source Spicebird project has its first Alpha release coming up soon, and to tease us they’ve posted a video of what to expect. We’ve outlined all of the features demonstrated in the video below, and provided screenshots from each important aspect of the program.

They haven’t released Spicebird 0.3 Alpha yet, but you can plan on it having a customizable homepage, email, calendar, contacts, and instant messaging all rolled into the application. As time goes on they would like to integrate a way to blog from Spicebird as well as a task manager.

The great thing about Spicebird is that it seems really intuitive. They’ve laid out the various services (email, calendar, etc…) into an already familiar tabbed interface. Take a look for yourself at what Spicebird 0.3 Alpha will have to offer when it is released:

–Homepage–

This is one of the really unique aspects of the program. It’s a customizable homepage that has a handful of modules by default. There’s a module for your inbox, calendar, clocks, feeds, and agenda. You can add multiple copies of each module to your homepage if you would like, such as one for each inbox, and they can be arranged by dragging them around.

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–Email–

Email works just like it does in Mozilla Thunderbird. The nice thing is that it will detect when an event is mentioned in an email, and offer to schedule it for you. That’s a lot like what Gmail does with Google Calendar.

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–Calendar–

As expected the calendar will completely support the drag & drop creation/management of events. If you’ve used Mozilla Sunbird before you’ll already be pretty familiar with how this works.

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–Contacts–

There’s not a whole lot you can do with a contact list, but this one looks pretty nice.

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–Instant Messenger–

Chatting is rather straight forward, and it looks like for right now it will only work with Jabber accounts. I’m guessing that would mean Google Talk can easily be setup.

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