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On 03/22/2010 02:40 PM, Jonathan Protzenko wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4BA7E3C8.8010205@gmail.com" type="cite">
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1) We used to see really amazing extensions like this one:<br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.visophyte.org/blog/2009/04/01/thunderbird-gloda-exptoolbar-protovis-paninaro-oh-oh-oh/">http://www.visophyte.org/blog/2009/04/01/thunderbird-gloda-exptoolbar-protovis-paninaro-oh-oh-oh/</a><br>
<br>
It doesn't seem to be updated. Are there any plans to move this
forward
/ maintain it? There are some other possibilities (see
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/19/21-ways-to-visualize-and-explore-your-email-inbox/">http://flowingdata.com/2008/03/19/21-ways-to-visualize-and-explore-your-email-inbox/</a>
for instance) and I'm sure many people would be excited to see
such
visualizations as "recommended" addons on AMO. Of course, once the
APIs
are improved and manipulating messages is as easy as toggling a
<div> with jQuery, it will be even easier to build such
things.
But what's the general stance on this?<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Exptoolbar itself is dead but we're not done mining its corpse. A
lot of our efforts on it fed into the faceted search implementation,
but we weren't able to productize everything. Hopefully most of the
ideas and some of the code will find new life in more
maintainable/extensible forms.<br>
<br>
I myself am a ridiculous fan of visualization, but it's very
important to me that we avoid the 'research prototype' scenario
where someone pours a ton of effort into creating something great
but it ends up such a mess of code that it's hard to maintain and
lives in its own little universe apart from all other extensions and
slowly bit-rots.<br>
<br>
The great news is that thanks to the continued progress of the
protovis visualization library and the jetpack framework, most of
the wheels have already been invented for us. Although we are
definitely going to support jQuery and it is fantastic for
prototypes, I have found that it does not particularly scale well in
and of itself. You end up needing to build a framework of your own
but still have to fight the tendency of the code to want to be
write-only.<br>
<br>
<br>
I'm going to address the other points in a separate reply for size
reasons.<br>
<br>
Andrew<br>
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