Spicebird 0.4. The Open Source Outlook Alternative
What is Spicebird?
Spicebird is a set of software applications from Mozilla's Thunderbird, Sunbird etc. and is maintained by Synovel Technologies as free software.
The application is a collaboration of information such as RSS, E-mail, Contacts, Tasks, Calendars and even Instant Messaging. It sets itself as a perfect alternative to Microsoft's Outlook and boasts being free, open source and impressive features for a version labelled 0.4.
Spicebird is currently available for the Windows and Linux platforms.
Spicebird's Interface and Features
The interface is very simple and easily understandable with a tabbed layout for Home, Mail/News, Contacts, Calendar and Tasks. Within each tab you have specific preferences towards the category and you can easily set up POP or IMAP e-mail accounts via the familiar Thunderbird interface under the Mail/News tab.
On opening the application you are presented to your Home where you can add your own RSS feeds and even configure how many links to display while having applets float around your page (like iGoogle) that identify the date & time etc. Hopefully with the expansion of the software we can see some more applets. Version 0.4 only supports adding a calendar, agenda, RSS feeds, mail folder view and the date and time.
Interestingly enough Spicebird has simplified adding a Gmail account and has it as a default option instead of adding a regular mail account. All you are required to do is provide a gmail username and password.
Your contacts are split up into categories of your personal address book, instant messaging contacts and collected addresses.
Calendar and Tasks
I've played around with Spicebird for a bit and added some calendar events and some tasks to test things out. To be honest, I've never used Mozilla's Sunbird before but thanks to the overwhelmingly easily understandable interface there was nothing for me to figure out.
With this being really easy to use it's also very quick to get around. It took little effort to give descriptive details to my tasks as I was adding them. Definitely good.
Instant Messaging in Spicebird
Spicebird allows us to run any Jabber-based IM account within itself. I found this handy while having my Gmail's IMAP account linked to the E-mail tab and having my Gmail contacts appear under the Contacts tab and see who is online.
What's more is I can set my status as being away just like I would in any other IM client.
Conclusions
Although I'd agree that this is a great piece of software. I still think that it lacks some polishing and definitely an enormous amount of applets for the Home section in my opinion. After doscussing Spicebird with a few other folks we've brought up these as possible feature requests:
- Additional IM Protocols
- Spell Checking Support for IM
- A Port to the Mac Platform
The additional IM protocols might however be restricted to just IRC which I think is a good idea since it's definitely more universal and also, Mozilla already has an extension for Firefox called ChatZilla.
Spicebird looks promising at a young age. Only time will tell whether it will be successful.