Lightning is supposed to reach 0.9 in the August timeframe, and it’s going to be a long wait.  I haven’t used Lightning because the interface was so kludgy to me that I didn’t feel like it was making me productive (yeah, superficial of me, whatever).  But at the recent Calendar face to face the developers put a lot of spit and polish into how the calendar works and addressed some real usability issues, focusing on giving the user the most important information (and no more) in a modern, attractive way.  God bless them, they even removed the 2px border on the months and replaced it with something less fugly.

A developer’s outline of some of the changes can be found on Bryan Clark’s blog here, and additional interface mockups can be found on the Mozilla Wiki here and here.

Now, I’m hopeful that the Thunderbird devs will also apply the spit and polish to the 3.0 release due out at the end of the year or (more likely) early next year.  I’d love to see Thunderbird come into the modern age of email and set defaults that people actually USE instead of being idealistic about how email SHOULD function.  Specifically

• The account setup is a mess, and there are way too many redundant options between Options and Accounts
• All modern email programs just assume that you’re going to be using HTML.  I don’t know of any other (popular) program that would assume that you’re sending plain text or put up an annoying prompt to send in plain text, html, or both.  I know that email *should* be in plain text and there’s no reason for it not to, but people just don’t use it that way.
• All modern email programs also assume a sans serif font for message composition.  While serifs are great for printed documents, it doesn’t have as usable place in the world of electronic, on-screen purposes.
• Why is the default behavior set to put the reply BELOW the message being replied to?  I mean, I understand that as a holdout from the newsgroup days it makes more logical sense for the conversation to flow properly from top to bottom with the more recent stuff at the bottom of the page.  But seriously… who uses email like that?
• Nearly every email program I’ve ever seen that people actually use forwards messages inline and not as attachments.  Why does Thunderbird insist on the default being to forward as an attachment?

I know those are a couple of items that have been controversial within the developer community before, but whenever I recommend Thunderbird to someone else I find that they either stop using it or ask me to change it to work like Outlook Express.  I know those options can be changed, but it’s a confusing process to do so in the plethora of options menus.  It’s time to do to Thunderbird what Mozilla did to Firefox: Simply, simplify, simplify, and add better defaults!

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