Introducing Raindrop from Mozilla Labs | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Raindrop from Mozilla Labs

labs.mozilla.com

84 pointsmcxx41 comments

There's a common but often-ignored meta-lesson here - begin by describing what the thing actually does, concretely.

"An exploration in messaging innovation being led by the team responsible for Thunderbird, to explore new ways to use Open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences" has near-zero information content and happily eats up the invaluable initial attention and visual spaces. One has to scale up a substantial wall of text before reaching anything specific but not before being invited on a detour into the 'Guiding Principles'. I didn't go down that path but presumably the principles include 'Be vague'.

It may sound like mere grouchy nit-picking but I've found that this type of failure at basic communication in a project's description is often indicative of its future lack of success. The pages of the Chandler project used to be a wonderfully instructive example but even they seem to have cleaned up their act on their current website. A very incomplete list of words and expressions to avoid before clearly stating what a product does -

revolutionary

innovation

vision

open

passionate

watch a video/screencast

Any others?

Couldn't agree more. I'm looking at a number of payment processors and merchant services, and some make it extremely hard to figure out what they actually do--it's all buried in useless marketese.

Hear, hear! I read the first few sentences, saw "messaging"--strike one--saw a bunch of incoherent babble--strike two--then started skimming. Halfway down the page, I still had no idea what it actually DID, so I closed the page.

Could someone who was more interested than I was sum this up in a sentence? What does it actually do?

I agree with your point. I had to do some digging to get more concrete information.

When a friend’s link from YouTube or flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message, rather than rudely kicking you over to a separate browser tab. Notifications from computers and mailing lists should be organized for you, not clutter your Inbox or require tedious manual filter setup. It should be easy to smoothly integrate new web services into your conversation viewer entirely using open web technologies.

http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/2009/10/22/introducing-rain...

I read that far too, but it wasn't very compelling. Getting videos in my IM instead of clicking on a link is revolutionary? They may proove me wrong, but it didn't make me want to download it.

Thunderbird is so painful to use that I have trouble imagining the Thunderbird team producing something great. I'd rather they fixed Thunderbird.

I'm tired of:

- Getting prompted for every single message whether I want to send in html or plain text format.

- Search that takes forever.

- Junk in my inbox, messages I wanted in junk.

- A UI that finds any excuse to pop a modal dialog in my way.

Can anyone recommend another FOSS mail client that it is both good, and cross platform?

gmail?

have you looked at thunderbird 3.0b4/ the new search works great

GNUS

Your Thunderbird experience is almost completely opposite of mine. Gnus is my main e-mail client but there are a couple of Windows machines I run Thunderbird on.

All of your points can be solved by going through the configuration options. Maybe that shouldn't be necessary, but not everyone's the same.

Likewise. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the Thunderbird client, but it consistently and mostly stays out of the way. Search is pretty fast and messages go where they're supposed to go.

In ~five years of using it across three machines, I've only had two instances in which a folder got corrupted, and in both cases I was able to repair it and recover the messages.

Also, when I migrated from Windows to Linux, transitioning my email profile was utterly seamless.

If the command-line interface doesn't scare you, I recommend Mutt. It's customizable and have pgp integration.

It seems there's a Windows port too but I haven't tried it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/unixmail-w32/

Well the prompt for html/plain text can be turned off... But I also had a hard time finding it when I started using Thunderbird. Junk in your inbox - use a e-mail server with a good junk mail filter... your e-mail client won't ever be as good as filtering... and you don't want to be downloading tons of e-mails before you can filter them...

I agree with your other pointers....

But no, I can't recommend another e-mail client

I have not tried it, but Zimbra released a desktop client. http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html

Raindrop seems conspicuously similar to Wave, both in its title and its functionality.

It's interesting to see Mozilla getting more independent, post-Chrome.

I would say that it looks more like an extensible message classification "email" client that aggregates more than just email.

The point about the name is interesting.

the problem i see with it is that it's all client-side filtering. when you access your email account from another computer, a webmail client, an iphone, whatever, all of those messages are still lumped into your inbox unless you have server-side filtering.

i still use procmail on my server to shuffle messages into imap folders before any of the clients see them. mailing lists go to separate folders that i never have to look at on my phone and my inbox stays clean so that new mail notifications on my phone actually mean something important has come through.

I use procmail & IMAP on my server and raindrop as a IMAP client. Works well.

In addition, Raindrop, being written on top of CouchDB, supports n-master-replication. You could just replicate your locally filtered messages to your other devices with or without going through a central server.

so you need two sets of filters? procmail and raindrop? does raindrop actually move messages between folders or just present a filtered/sorted inbox like sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/)?

Raindrop doesn't filter, but it adheres your server filters

What's nice is that you don't have to depend on every server implementing the features you want. You just have to impllement the feature once in your client, and suddenly every message from every source "supports" that feature. Mozilla has been doing this with a lot of things, like identity (with Weave) and even web app mashups (with Ubiquity) are being moved into the browser.

Client-side filtering is far more powerful. All you need is to copy the filters to your other clients which, in effect, makes your client act as a local server :)

can you tell me how to do that on an iphone?

SYNC APP. Done. That kind of shit has been done before and it's not a problem at all.

The logo reminds me of Drupal:

http://images.google.com/images?q=drupal+logo

And the interface (http://www.flickr.com/photos/43332657@N06/3996189794/sizes/o...) looks similar to fever (http://feedafever.com/#demo)

This is only one of many possible, experimental interfaces. There already are alternatives, and they encourage for a lot more.

So far it's exactly what I do in gmail.

Whenever I sign up to a new mailing list I simply click filter messages from this mailing list when the confirmation arrives, select skip inbox and archive and apply a label of the mailing list name. That way, all the mailing lists have their own label on the left bar with the number of unread messages in each and don't clutter up my inbox.

I can do the same with facebook/amazon/whatever but I actually care about reading my facebook emails right away (I only get emails when invited to events or have new messages) and don't get much spam from amazon and whatnot, I always unsubscribe.

I fail to see any innovation in what they've done.

It is clearly in the same vibe as wave... only google has already a version with wave, it is opensource and is much further at the moment. I hope will not start to act like microsoft on innovation. Microsoft is getting used to "try to follow the leader, 10miles behind". Additionnaly their post doesnt even mention the existence of wave... what to think about that ?

They can't mention google wave in every post to their blog.

Try: http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop/faq/

>How does Raindrop relate to Google Wave?

>Google Wave is attempting to create a new form of messaging. We applaud their effort to innovate in the messaging space, and if it gains traction, we will be looking at ways to integrate the messaging protocols from Wave into the open, extensible user interface of the Raindrop platform. In the meantime, Raindrop is focusing on complementing existing messaging sources.

Sounds like a much more realistic approach than Wave.

The thing I found most interesting, is the use of couchdb and python for Raindrop instead of XUL.

My hypothesis: Due to CouchDB being used by both Canonical (UbuntuOne) and now Mozilla in new interesting 'products I'm more and less convinced that CouchDB will be become a the choice for data storage. It seems like a good replacement (although comparing the two isn't really fair) for sqlite.

Why? Because it supposedly (I haven't tested this myself yet) makes it very easy to sync between different couchdb instances (making it easier to have on- offline applications) and because you can 'run' a complete application from it using only html and javascript.

I've been reading Chris Anderson's (http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_list/index/recent-posts...) about how couchdb would transform both desktop and webapplications and nowadays I tend to agree more and more.

Curious as what other people think of this..

Wait, is this Thunderbird re-envisioned..? Are they seriously making this a windows client/download..??

EDIT: You can have it hosted by a service provider as indicated in one of their videos. Any chance of this being a success..? That's an honest, albeit, loaded question. Given the track record I'm not so sure...

It's a great idea that would probably have a better chance as a YC startup..

TB re-envisioned: I don't know. Will they make downloadable windows version: Yes.

There are videos describing the various component of Raindrop on Mozilla Messaging's Vimeo page, http://vimeo.com/mozillamessaging/videos

Scott Macgregor who used to head up the Thunderbird team seems to have built another email client (proprietary).

http://www.postbox-inc.com/

I don't think they bought the domain raindrop.com yet, yet somehow the screenshot shows the app at raindrop.com.

The status bar also says "transferring data from 127.0.0.1" -- and there's no "http:// at the front. They just edited the address bar after the page loaded.

Oh yea I knew that. Sorry, it's hard to pass vocal inflections and speech nuances into text and I forgot. When I said "yet somehow ..." I wasn't seriously inquiring how they did it, just the fact that they did do that. :)

Has anybody here taken a look at the code and/or managed to compile a (atleast half-working) working build???

Mozilla Wave? Who is next? Apple?

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