The roads I take...

Just to let y'all know, I'm back home from my 3-week vacation in the USA. I'm safe and sound but quite tired and I have a huge backlog to work in the next days, looks like about 1400 bugmails and 120 normal emails that I put aside to really work on - next to finishing up the photo collection and other stuff from the vacation. Oh, and I haven't even looked at newsgroups, planet or hg yet. So, expect to hear from me again, but don't expect me to be very responsive this week while I'm working that backlog.

Nuff said, I guess I should go to bed and get a good night's sleep first of all.

Here's a bit of an overview of press articles we got for the SeaMonkey 2.0 release. The English and German ones were collected by myself (we were pretty well-featured in German media), the French and Czech ones come from our respective localizers, Cédric and Pavel.
I've hidden two "easter eggs" in the English list that could help some of our users, by the way - a forum thread for ubuntu users (things are easier for some other Linux distros - openSUSE offers it in the build service and in upcoming openSUSE 11.2, and upcoming Fedora 12 also has SeaMonkey 2.0) and a link to the portable version that is available now.

English:

• theregister.co.uk: Mozilla's SeaMonkey 2.0 exits cryptobiosis
• cnet.com: Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.0
• mozillalinks.org: SeaMonkey 2.0 is here!
• slashdot.org: Mozilla Releases SeaMonkey 2.0
• lwn.net: SeaMonkey 2.0 released
• linux.com: Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.0 Released
• ubuntuforums.org: Seamonkey 2.0 released, ubuntuzilla needs tweak
• portableapps.com: SeaMonkey, Portable Edition
• it-chuiko.com: SeaMonkey 2.0 is ready
• internetnews.com: Mozilla SeaMonkey FINALLY hits 2.0
• h-online.com: Mozilla releases SeaMonkey 2.0
• ostatic.com: Mozilla Delivers SeaMonkey 2.0
• lifehacker.com: Mozilla SeaMonkey Updated to 2.0
• majorgeeks.com: SeaMonkey 2.0 Final
• maximumpc.com: SeaMonkey 2.0 Now Available
• applelinks.com: Mozilla SeaMonkey Project Releases SeaMonkey 2.0
• kabatology.com: Seamonkey 2.0 Released
• findmysoft.com: The New Features and Enhancements in SeaMonkey 2.0
• esoft.web.id: Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.0 Final: All you can do on the Internet you can do with SeaMonkey
• v3.co.uk: Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.0

German:

• heise.de: SeaMonkey 2.0 erschienen
• futurezone.orf.at: SeaMonkey 2.0 erschienen
• derstandard.at: Seamonkey 2.0: Mozilla-Nachfolger in neuer Version
• golem.de: Seamonkey 2.0 ist fertig
• pcwelt.de: Seamonkey 2.0 steht zum Download bereit
• zdnet.de: Mozilla veröffentlicht Browser-Suite Seamonkey 2.0
• winfuture.de: SeaMonkey 2.0 - Nachfolger der Mozilla-Suite
• pro-linux.de: Seamonkey 2.0 fertiggestellt
• linux-magazin.de: Browser-Suite Seamonkey 2.0 ist da
• webmasterpro.de: Mozilla Seamonkey 2.0 ist fertig
• t3n.de: Internet-Alleskönner Mozilla Seamonkey 2.0 ist fertig
• pc-professionell.de: Seamonkey 2.0 ist da
• macgadget.de: SeaMonkey 2.0 ist fertig
• tecchannel.de: Mozilla schließt kritische Lücken in SeaMonkey

French:

• 01net: Logiciel libre : SeaMonkey 2.0 à télécharger
• PC Inpact: SeaMonkey : une montagne d'améliorations pour la version 2.0
• Linuxfr: SeaMonkey 2.0 la suite Internet
• Silicon.fr: Navigateur web : la suite SeaMonkey 2.0 est en ligne !
• Generation NT: SeaMonkey : la suite Internet en version finale 2.0
• Clubic: Le navigateur tout-en-un SeaMonkey disponible en v.2.0
• PC Boost: SeaMonkey, le navigateur tout en 1, disponible en version 2.0
• Mac Generation: SeaMonkey passe la seconde
• Mac4ever: SeaMonkey : la suite communicante de Mozilla en version 2.0

Czech:

• mozilla.cz: Vy¨lo SeaMonkey 2.0!
• czilla.cz: SeaMonkey 2.0
• root.cz: Vy¨lo SeaMonkey 2.0
• lupa.cz: Přichází SeaMonkey 2.0, seznam novinek je dlouhý
• root.cz: Přichází SeaMonkey 2.0
• abclinuxu.cz: SeaMonkey 2.0
• slunecnice.cz: SeaMonkey 2.0: To nejlep¨í z Firefoxu a Thunderbirdu
• extrawindows.cz: Novinky: SeaMonkey 2.0, Simple Adblock, Unlocker a dal¨í
• mozilla-europe.org: SeaMonkey 2.0 - Moderní balík internetových aplikací je tu!

Oh, and here's a scanned image from the German IT magazine - c't (Edition of October 26th, page 52):

It's about RC2, but still cool to be present in that magazine...

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 44/2009 (October 26 - November 1, 2009):

• Releases:
  While I sat in a talk at the Cyber Liberties Conference here in Vienna on Tuesday, I performed the final steps for the big 2.0 release - web site updates and sending out the announcements. Downloads picked up fast and we should be around or over 100,000 of those less than a week later (I don't have good numbers due to disabling bouncer logs once again when database loads became high with Firefox 3.5.4 beings released as well).
  I'm reading and reacting to loads of feedback on the newsgroups, most seems good, esp. migrating from 1.x seems to have slightly rough edges though.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  The final 2.0 release sports 19 official languages plus an experimental Turkish version, and other locales have told me they are working on getting ready to join when we'll do a 2.0.1 in December.
  Two small patches could land to get dashboard ready to support both SeaMonkey branches (sea20x and sea21x) in the future.
  I added Simplified Chinese to our all-locales files, to hopefully have them in as one of those, increasing our world coverage a lot (oh, while we're at Asian languages, Japanese is aiming to join as well).
• Various Discussions:
  AMO and German dictionary, comm-central branching, ChatZilla move to hg, modal windows, dormant accounts, FF 3.5 -> 3.6 updates and SeaMonkey 2.x impact, Cyber Liberties Conference and Open Web track/talks, the twisted clearUserPref() story, Thunderbird 3.0 RC freeze, AMO compatibility center, etc.

The amount of posts in the SeaMonkey support newsgroup is almost mindboggling right now, and thanks to the team (thank you for supporting us!) are mixing with migration problem from 1.x, unclarities about changed feature sets, as well as other questions and problems.
The step from 1.x to 2.0 is rather large, we know that, and migration is something people don't test repeatedly, so it was clear we would run into a certain amount of problems there, that's just unavoidable. I'm pretty happy with the low amount of real bugs that have popped up so far, though I'd be happy if I would have the time to prepare an update parallel to the crash-fix Firefox 3.5.5 release that's upcoming late this or early next week - unfortunately, the slowness of our build machines, some time needed for community QA, and my vacation starting Saturday leaves too little time to do such a cycle in time and we'll need to wait with fixing those somewhat higher-profile crashes only in December in a 2.0.1 update.
I hope our users can do with what we have in 2.0 until then - and of course, we'll work on improving this product even further, with 2.0.* stability and security updates as well as a 2.1 development cycle and release next year.