Mozilla Raindrop Continued….

As promised this evening I continued my adventure with Mozilla Raindrop. This time configuring it with a couple of accounts. A Gmail account and a Twitter account.

Thoughts:
- As before I found the process very easy. Even though the current prototype requires me to create a .raindrop config file and I’m concerned that the passwords on this config file are not hashed or anything, which I suppose is not possible for technical reasons. I’d rather have the passwords stored in some secured database.

- It synced the Gmail account just fine, and immediately auto-detected two of the mailing lists that existed in the account and synced the folders without a problem. But I am interested to see how immediate the IMAP synchronization is. I would like to see it use the IMAP idle command to make messages come in almost instantly as Mac Mail does. But remember this is a prototype so I don’t expect a finished product here, in fact I’m interested in possibly writing my own raindrop plugin for server alert systems.

- Also the Twitter account I added worked very well, the recent tweets all appeared and Raindrop imported all the accounts I was following as contacts along with their thumbnail images. Very nice.

There are two things which after about 10 minutes of playing with it I’m wondering about. There an ability to send a message. How do you define where that message is supposed to go to.
Can this replace a normal email client? I think it has the potential. But like we all know this is prototype, and there’s a bunch of great people working on it!

Mozilla Raindrop First Impressions

I’ve installed Mozilla Labs Raindrop 0.1 on my local machine running Mac OS X 10.6 (Leopard).

First impression, it’s very easy to install and get going with from a technical point of view. I already had macports installed and so I installed couchdb, mercurial, and most of the python dependencies using macports for easy management and the ability to easily upgrade them.

After that it was just a matter of running the raindrop configure script which downloaded the extras like twitter, skype, and paisley python modules and away we go!

So that’s it for now, at the side you’ll see a screenshot of the browser window I get right now. It’s not configured yet or anything like that, but more is coming!