New version of Mailbox Alert! Not much change in the outwards appearance, but there's a total rewrite of the way of storing the settings. This should fix the problems that some people were having when changing locales. And as a side-effect, settings are now kept when you rename a folder.

Oh, and the de_DE locale has been added.

If you update and then revert to an old version, the settings will be gone in the old version. If you plan on going back, make a backup your prefs.js file before you restart Thunderbird :)

BookCrossing

I know this is kind of off-topic here, but I wanted to share this anyway.

Once or twice a month I walk up to my mailbox (it's a bit out of my normal route, since I usually enter my building from the back of the apartment building, and the mailbox is at the front door). Because of this, I am used that there are quite a few letters and overdue bills stacked up in there. Which is another reason to delay fetching my mail. Maybe i need some real life mailbox alert system, but I digress.

Today I went down there and what I found just made my day. Between the usual notices, spam, and misdelivered mail (which might be another story worth telling), I found something that just made my day.

I often order books and movies online, but hadn't recently, so I was quite surprised that in the stacks of letters, there was a book. On the cover there was a dutch label congratulating me for receiving what translates as a 'stray book'. The label told me to check inside the cover and there I found the following message:

Howdy! Hola! Bonjour! Guten Tag!

I'm a very special book. You see, I'm traveling around the world making new friends. I hope I've met another friend in you. Please go to www.BookCrossing.com and enter my BCID number (shown below).

You'll discover where I've been and who has read me, and can let them know I'm safe here in your hands. Then... READ and RELEASE me!

(BCID CODE)

I had never heard of BookCrossing; it is like a global book club where people who have finished a book register it, then 'forget' it somewhere, passing on the book and giving a random person the chance to enjoy the book too. Their goal is making the whole world one big library.

This book was left in a random mailbox which just happened to be mine.

By registering and labeling a book, you essentialy free it to explore the world, giving it the chance to make someone else happy, instead of letting it collect dust on your bookshelf.

Great idea. I've got some reading to do.

Jelte

I've put my site back in svn, this time not to keep a history (revision control isn't really tailored for websites imho), but so that it can be automatically published if i make a change. This message is mostly a test to see if it works. Since you are reading this, apparently it does.

At last! A new version of Mailbox Alert!

See the Changelog for more information. Or, if you're in a hurry, you can download it directly.

The new version will be uploaded to http://addons.mozilla.org shortly, but confirmation usually takes a few weeks. If you want it now, download it from my site.

I have had reports that Mailbox Alert's 'show a message' option produces an error when using it on mac OSX. Apparently this part of the Thunderbird/XPCOM library is disabled for OSX at the moment. Users are adviced to use Growl for showing alerts.