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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Spicebird [via Lifehacker]
The thing is, were I ever to use an actual application to do these things I would want it to be syncronised with the online applications I use so that I can get at the information anywhere. I like Windows Calendar but will never use it because it doesn’t sync with Google Calendar. Similarly I would be happy using Thunderbird for RSS but it wouldn’t syncronise with Google Reader or Netvibes (the two feed aggregators that I have used). The beauty of an XMPP or IMAP service is that the standard means you get everything synced etc. across any platform you use, and until other services use this then its a no-go to start using apps over websites.
Wow…that came out nowhere, that looks like sweet app. I am going to try that out once it’s released.
I couldn’t agree with you more, but at the same time things have to start somewhere. The problem is that many online services don’t have the API’s needed to create fully synchronizable tools. Even Google Calendar is pretty limited in the information that can be synced, which is disappointing.