Mozilla Raindrop makes a splash
By Dave Jeyes
Over the weekend Mozilla Labs launched the prototype of a new Web-based messaging inbox called Raindrop that helps sift through all of your messages to make sure you don’t miss important ones. More importantly Raindrop collects your email, Twitter and Skype messages into one clean inbox called the Inflow.
Raindrop doesn’t sit on your desktop like most email inboxes, but rather on a Web server that you can access using your browser. It collects the mail from Gmail and any of your other accounts that allow you to use the IMAP protocol.
Then Raindrop stores your messages on the server in JSON format for faster access from your Web browser. The JSON format is a text format that is designed for fast parsing using JavaScript, which is what Mozilla used for a large portion of Raindrop’s interface.
Raindrop’s Inflow messaging inbox was built using the Dojo JavaScript library and has control widgets that allow you to filter and reply to messages without having to reload the page. Raindrop is also designed to let developers customize the code quickly and easily.
Another way that developers will be able to build more functions into Raindrop is using its built-in Extender. This means that developers can release plugins for things like spell-check just like they would for a browser.
The only difference is that with Raindrop, everything is built for the Web. That means that developers don’t have to write code for the desktop environment at all.
However the fact that Raindrop is a Web application means that most of us probably won’t have a Web server or the skills to get it installed and running. Mozilla is working on packaging Raindrop and it’s possible that someone will build it into a Web site.
The inbox hasn’t evolved much in the last decade as the Internet has taken off. It’s good to see that the Mozilla team is thinking of better ways to manage the growing mountain of messages each of us receive daily in the information overload era.
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