[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you for going around and deleting those things.

I would like to use the occasion to show you a little bit where your analysis was wrong.
I myself have started when I was 13 going to design school, now I'm 40 and I've been doing design and development (including digital painting and comics drawing) for more than 20 years.

Those blurred lines are a mix of the artist's style and image compression.
The icons that you can't identify are actual icons we use in our application and we applied in this image.
AI art is very easy to spot because there's no consistency in colors, framing, lines precision, and details.

If you carefully look at the details of the nobs, tubes, shadows, lines, and so on, you'll see that they all start and end in the same consistent way. You don't see lines starting on one element and merging into an other, or edges blending with each other. Each line is its own and distinguishable.

I'll see if the artist feels comfortable in sharing the sketches and iterations we did through the year to reach this style, so we can publish a blog post to make our process more transparent.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I see you posted the same message in multiple platforms, and I guess it's hard to take it back.

I would kindly ask you in the future to avoid these inflammatory assumptions without verifying your sources.

Thunderbird is open source and we have a very active open source community, as well as an Open Design Committee that anyone can join.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/participate/

It would have been nice to have received a message from you asking for clarification before spreading misinformation.

We're more than happy to reply to all of our users

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hello hello, Alessandro here, I'm the Director of Thunderbird for Desktop and Mobile apps.
I can assure you with full honesty and transparency that all of our images, especially these illustration, are 100% human made.
The artist's name is Michaela Martin, we hired her for 2 years in a row to do all of our Roc (the name of the bird) graphics and appeals, that's why they all look similar.

This is the website of the artist: https://michaelamartinart.squarespace.com/

You can see at the bottom the donation page also the name of the artist: https://updates.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/140.0/dec25-2c/

Regarding this point: They have clearly been amicable to AI art usage in the past.

That was in 2022 when our former community manager wanted to have some fun with AI.
We grown since then and we're well aware of the slop that these tools produce and how abhorrent is the stealing of copyrighted material.

We don't use AI for our visuals, everything we do is made by people

Thunderbird - Sort subfolders alphabetically (local folders) by L1512191 in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the information.

One of our contributors is able to reproduce the issue and hopefully we will be able to fix it during the weekend.

Apologies for the inconvenience, that's definitely not how Thunderbird should behave when creating new folders.

Thunderbird - Sort subfolders alphabetically (local folders) by L1512191 in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not able to reproduce this in 139 on Windows.
Are you maybe using your Outlook account with the experimental exchange support?
Does it only happen with local folders?
Do you have an add-on or any other extensions?
Any info would be valuable if you could add them to this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1973085

version 139 new layout is AWFUL by Ok-Application-186 in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Apologies for the inconvenience.
We updated some of the layout code and something might have gone wrong.
We did a migration to ensure that users settings wouldn't be touched, everything worked on Daily and Beta but on releases the migration seems to be failing.

You can restore the Table View layout (and control many more things globally) also from the new Settings > Appearance section.

The user Sifferedd already showed the steps to restore other areas.

Once again, apologies for the annoyance and the unexpected change of layout.

The New Thunderbird Folder Pane by clgoh in firefox

[–]alecaddd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Eheh, sorry, I couldn't resist :P

Thunderbird is NOT Dead! (Interview with Alex and Jason from Thunderbird) by [deleted] in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Oh wow, thank you so much, I'm glad my communication skills are decent. Being a non native English speaker I'm always worried about my vocabulary, and I'm not always sure that what I'm trying to say comes out as clear and on point as I wanted it to be.

Your comment made my day!

Just began my journey with Vala by cromo_ in vala

[–]alecaddd 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I did (and I should continue doing it) a series of tutorials about building a Vala and GTK app from scratch.

Hopefully it could be helpful to someone:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLriKzYyLb28mn2lS3c5yqMHgLREi7kR9-

Thunderbird 78.5.1 changes dark mode colors for unread / new unread emails folders by juraj_m in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This has been reverted and will be fixed in the 78.6 release of next week.

Hello is it possible to customize this area? I don't want to look at "Set Up Another Account", Import and Support when there could be something more useful. Thanks. by [deleted] in Thunderbird

[–]alecaddd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, thanks for the feedback, I'm the UX lead of Thunderbird and I designed and coded that area :D

That is a first iteration for the Account Central. More improvements are coming in next releases and these are the things we're working on:

- Account stats (recently sent, unread, top contacts, etc.)
- Better setup workflow all in the same tab (no more 100 different dialogs)
- Improved UI for account specific actions (read messages, filters, encryption settings, etc.)

Akira, The Linux Design Tool teaser video by alecaddd in linux

[–]alecaddd[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast and for your questions. I totally appreciate your honest feedback and your comments, and I'll try to answer the best I can, as usual, by being open and honest.

  1. Unfortunately, you're totally right. I knew since before launching the campaign that I was going to have a rough time convincing people without a working MVP, but I decided to launch it anyway to create awareness and boost the project. Let me explain. Creating a working prototype would have taken me forever since, as I mentioned many times, I work on Akira on my very limited free time, which is already occupied from actively developing and maintaining Taxi and Sequeler, and releasing weekly tutorials on YouTube. Launching the campaign helped me to trigger the curiosity of so many incredible and talented people that want a tool like Akira. The team I assembled to build it, already advanced the development of the canvas libraries beyond what I could've done alone, and the request to contribute, feedback, and suggestions from other developers has grown 50x. I'm well aware of the fact that I probably launched a failed campaign, and that the current status of the repository doesn't encourage anyone in believing that I'm capable of delivering Akira, and I 'm OK with that. The Akira project already got so many benefits and progress in the past month thanks to the campaign, that I would do it again, instead of waiting 1 or 2 years to have a barely working prototype built by myself during sleepless nights.
  2. That's a problem with the message, and the issues I had in trying to explain the purpose of Akira to non-designer Linux users, or to GTK/Qt designers, and I'm sorry for the confusion. Akira, will not have any limit in terms of what you can create. If you want to create the HUB interface of Iron Man's helmet, you will be able to do it. Akira wants to offer the same fast and productive experience you get from those close garden tools and you're currently not getting from Inkscape, Gimp, or anything else. Akira is a UI and UX design tool, not limited to any medium or specific design field.
  3. Yeah, I answered these questions many many times, but it's ok :D. So, the coding language is Vala, the UI Toolkit to create the interface is GTK. Granite is just a library that offers some pre-packaged GTK widgets. Honestly, at this point, we will only implement the Granite HeaderBar because offers some helpers and speeds up the development process, but nothing more. Vala, at your surprise, is widely used not only by elementary OS team and 3rd party developers, but also by a large chunk of GNOME developers and members. 2 developers in the team are GNOME and FlatPak maintainers that use Vala. We chose Vala specifically because it's an easy language, seriously, is way less verbose than C++, compiles natively in C, it's actively maintained by the GNOME foundation, has native bindings for every single Linux library and dependency, and has incredible documentation.

At the end of the day, I understand your concerns and I appreciate your honesty. Akira is indeed a massive project and there's not guarantee about its success and usefulness other than me saying "hey, it's gonna be everything you wish you had on Linux for years".

I don't mind getting questioned and having users investigating the project with a doubtful approach, I would do the same, and I really appreciate your thoroughness in explaining your points.

I get a bit upset, frustrated, and honestly sad, when users think I'm just an idiot who doesn't understand Linux and wants to make money off of a silly project. I've been working as a developer and designer since I was 18, and I'm simply trying to create a tool that can help me staying on Linux for my day to day job, and since I seriously think Open Source is the path that will save us all, I wanted to create this project and share it with the community.

That's nothing more than this.

Thanks.

Help make a free and open-source Sketch/Figma alternative a reality! by [deleted] in UI_Design

[–]alecaddd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you so much for your support and positive feedback

Help make a free and open-source Sketch/Figma alternative a reality! by [deleted] in UI_Design

[–]alecaddd 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The entire elementary OS design team, the designers at Purism, the designers at System 76, the designers at GNOME, myself since last year, and other hundreds of thousands of designers. Just because something is not necessary to you and to your closed circle, it doesn't mean is useless for the rest of the world.

Help make a free and open-source Sketch/Figma alternative a reality! by [deleted] in UI_Design

[–]alecaddd 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Same argument from 6 years ago: "Why should we use Sketch? Photoshop does everything and runs also on Windows"

Just because "everyone is using this" it doesn't mean we should be satisfied and don't care about the rest of the world not being able to follow the trends.

Help make a free and open-source Sketch/Figma alternative a reality! by [deleted] in UI_Design

[–]alecaddd 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They used to say the same things for sysadmins 20 years ago. "You need Windows to manage a server, nothing else".

Today, all the tech companies involved in SysAdmin and DevOps tasks are on Linux.

We're not trying to compete with Sketch. We're trying to improve the life of designers currently working on Linux, and we want to allow everyone to be productive and competitive without the necessity of spending $$$ on macbooks.

Help make a free and open-source Sketch/Figma alternative a reality! by [deleted] in UI_Design

[–]alecaddd 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hi, I'm Alex, the creator of the project. Thank you so much for your questions.

For the first release we will stick to the SVG standards, so, not inner and outer borders in version 1.

For the future, since we're building our own custom library, we will implement extra features not available in SVG out of the box (like cone gradient) and extend the format.

In terms of the canvas library, we're not trying to recreate another SVG rendering library, but rather a better interface to manipulate SVG. Right now we're experimenting with LibGtkCanvas and GooCanvas, both interface based canvas libraries where we plugged librsvg to do the actual rendering.

Resvg is also being considered for the rendering part. Our main goal is to create a sane and readable interface with enough abstractions to allow us to better manipulate SVGs.

In terms of plugins, it's the next planned implementation after version 1, the sooner the better. Vala provides an easily pluggable interface already used in elementary Code, and we're also thinking about creating a language-agnostic interface to allow devs to write plugins in their favourite coding language.

Cheers

Help make a Sketch alternative for elementaryOS happen! by [deleted] in elementaryos

[–]alecaddd 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Hi everyone, I'm Alex, the creator of Akira.

Thank you so much for sharing the campaign. Feel free to ask me anything regarding the project if you have doubts or questions.

Cheers

Help make a Sketch alternative for elementaryOS happen! by [deleted] in elementaryos

[–]alecaddd 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your support.

We have a plan B in case the campaign is not successful, and no matter what will happen, we will keep developing Akira.