Alistair’s Blog

Raindrop

I just spent about an hour installing Raindrop and here is what I think.

For those of you who read my blog (next to none) and don't know what Raindrop is, it is a product from Mozilla that is in very early development and it is a mixture of Goolge Wave and Email. It uses all the old protocols and mixes them together giving you all the information that you need. The Raindrop website is avaliable at: http://labs.mozilla.com/raindrop

It is a lot of work to install, espicially if you have never done this type of thing before. There are heaps of dependiceis that you have to download, although there is an option to install them all automaticly (if you are brave). After downloading it you have to edit configuration files. I am still not sure if I did it right, I am having lots of problems. After getting everything set up, it is not as easy as opening an app, there are some steps required before opening it.

Now before I go any further this is BEFORE Alpha this is one of the first builds, you can only install from source code and it is not yet finished. There is still A LOT of work to go, before people can start using it. I can not wait for this to be further deveolped into a full fledged communication manager.

So to open Raindrop after unpacking and configuring everything there are a couple of commands that must be oppened. As seen in the picutre below.

I am not sure if I am surposed to leave it update, I normally leave it for a while. After leaving it connect then you have to open the webpage. It will only work if the two otehr processors are running.

After opening the webpage it loads. This is where I am confused, it has some of my Twitter stream there, but the Twitter stream does not seem to update. It just stays were it is.

As for Gmail, I can not get it to work. This is pretty much all the functionality that is added at the moment. I can not seem to post Tweets, Direct Messages don't work, while contacts and sent work pretty well.

That is my review of Raindrop, I will keep testing it out to see if I can find anything else.