Mozilla Lightning 0.1 Released 198
Mini-Geek writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Lightning 0.1 is released. Lightning is a new Mozilla-made calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that will eventually (once it becomes more mature and stable) be built into Thunderbird. From the article: 'The Lightning Project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Its goal is to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Mozilla Thunderbird.'"
Screenshots :) (Score:5, Informative)
I Feel SO Safe (Score:2)
When trying to download Lightning... [Sigh]
Re:I Feel SO Safe (Score:2)
Re:I Feel SO Safe (Score:2)
Re:Screenshots :) (Score:2)
That's a bit smug, don't you think? After all, older versions of MOST browsers [libpng.org] may have difficulty displaying PNG images, and the ones you posted don't use transparency, which is IE's main problem.
Re:Screenshots :) (Score:2)
Re:Screenshots :) (Score:2)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69903184@N00/7086972
Re:Screenshots :) (Score:2)
Re:Screenshots :) (Score:2)
Wait for it. If you don't want to wait, help out. If you don't want to do either of those, this is not the extension you are looking for.
Re:Screenshots :) (Score:2)
Confused (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Confused (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Confused (Score:2)
Mail + Calendar?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand hy the integration is taking so long. Sunbird has been around for a year or more and it's slow as molassas in February. I try to use it but it's such a hog that it pains me to leave it running. It should be 500Kb big, and open in 2 seconds on a P4. This is 2006, we should be demanding applications that open in blazing speeds, not more features.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2, Funny)
Try it in May or June. Its usually faster around that time of the year.
try Remind/Wyrd (Score:2)
Disclaimer: Yes, I wrote Wyrd, and am therefore thoroughly convinced of it's awesomeness. But in all seriousness, it's extremely fast and runs in under 2MB. Textmode applications have their advantages.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2)
"do one thing and do it well"
This merging of functions is the path to feature bloat.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2, Insightful)
In a corporate environment, scheduling and email go hand in hand, which is why I'm glad to see the MozCal project finally take steps forward.
I still agree with parent. Mac OSX has separate email and calendar (and address book) apps, which do their own things, but still integrate nicely together. Speedwise beat the Mozilla apps as well. Worthy of learning from, IMHO.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2)
There's a difference between needed features and bloat.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2)
Mail + spamfilter = good, if the spam filter is a separate (library | application | plugin). This means that I can use the spamfilter of my choice (or even write one) with the mail program as long as it interfaces correctly.
What is bad is a mail program with an embedded spam filter that you can't rip out and change. This sort of lock-in sucks. Better ways of doing things come along all the time, and if I have to change my mail and spam filter setup becaus
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2)
No, I guess I don't see how email and calendaring might be related.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2)
You don't see any calendar functions in MSN messenger, do you?
Actually, if you're running the whole shebang - AD, Exchange, Outlook and an internal MSN server - when you do things that are scheduled in your calendar (eg: go to a meeting, go to lunch) your IM presence is automatically updated to reflect that. It's quite nice.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Mail + Calendar+Browser+Chat+Editor (Score:2)
Wait, we did have that in mozilla before the "core team" cut them all apart to simplify everything.
Now they start coming back together.
Whou would have thought that people might want to have a browser, calendar, and email client integrated? Brilliant!
Seamonkey? What kind of name is that? Mozilla was bad enough, at least you could stick with the same stupid name.
Re:Mail + Calendar?! (Score:2)
In big organisations, lots of people (especially those higher up the food chain) live, work and breath by their electronic calendars. Communication between calendars, via vCalendar/iCalendar or whatever, can theoretically be done using any number of transport protocols, but the only one that is universally implemented is by SMTP.
Hence, if you want to set meetings with someone through your electronic calendar, you need one that is integrated with
MS was hardly the first... (Score:3, Informative)
It's a functional expectation of old-school corporate e-mail, not an MS "innovation"...
rephrase (Score:2, Insightful)
Pocket PC Compatability (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pocket PC Compatability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pocket PC Compatability (Score:2)
Re:Pocket PC Compatability (Score:2)
Nope, I'm tied to a local solution, with periodic updates over a shared internal network. If I could find a way out, I would, bu
Re:Pocket PC Compatability (Score:2)
The other 99.9% of the world sits in front of their desktop computer all day, then goes home. You might need something speci
Syncing with Thunderbird/Sunbird (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pocket PC Compatability (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.finchsync.com/ [finchsync.com]
FinchSync is a tool for synchronizing contacts, appointments and tasks from Mozilla email and calendar products with a Pocket PC.
Re:Pocket PC Compatability (Score:2)
http://www.essentialpim.com/ [essentialpim.com]
No, I don't work for the company, I just like their app
Needless to say, I would love to see the lightning project finished and connecting with PocketPC.
other calendaring solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:other calendaring solutions (Score:3)
Seriously, I view remote apps as dangerous and uncontrollable. I don't have an IT staff, or a local webserver. I'm on my laptop most of the time, and (around me) there are precious few places I can get on the 'net when I'm out of the office, and most of them wan't me to pay several dollars for an hour or two of time (no, I don't live in/near a big city). Online apps don't work for me, and certainly not for a mission critical app like my calendar.
Unfortuntaly, unless
Re:other calendaring solutions (Score:2)
Luckily for me, .Mac gives me the best of both worlds. I can get to my calendar through the .Mac web site and I can also get at it offline using iCal from my laptop.
Surely there's something similar for other operating systems?
Re:other calendaring solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:other calendaring solutions (Score:4, Funny)
Re:other calendaring solutions (Score:2)
Re:other calendaring solutions (Score:2)
Re:other calendaring solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, sure, there are various workarounds. You could use a VPN and store all your calendar information on an smb share or nfs drive, but that's pretty slow, not to menti
Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
Lightning? Hopefully it is useful to get people to switch away from Outlook, but its the lack of Exchange support that matters to most people, Hopefully that gets added soon!
good work mozilla lightning team!
Suitable Exchange compatible linux apps?? (Score:2)
So I am wondering: What exchange compatible applications are Slashdotters using in linux?
Re:Suitable Exchange compatible linux apps?? (Score:2)
btw, how hard was it to install zimbra ?
i remember that installing openxchange was pretty awful experience.
i'm somewhat concerned by the fact that some pretty important parts (mostly backup/restore of individual mailboxes) is not currently avilable under opensource licence (though i understand they have to motivate purchases somehow
Beware of Known Dataloss Bugs (Score:2)
Please be aware, that the use of nightly developer builds has some risks associated with it. Don't use them with production data.
* There are KNOWN DATALOSS BUGS in the calendaring code.
o Don't trust these builds with important calendaring or mail data
o Always make backups (one possible strategy for Calendaring data backups is described at Calendar:WebDAV testing harness)
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
By having some
Info on Google Calendar (Score:2)
Re:Info on Google Calendar (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Info on Google Calendar (Score:2, Informative)
Sunbird? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sunbird? (Score:5, Informative)
I used Sunbird for a little while a while back, and while it is a step in the right direction, it really needs a lot of work. Of course, this new release may have fixed all the bugs that irked me, and it is of course only version 0.1 - and with that in mind, Sunbird/Lightning really is a factor to consider, but not quite ready for widespread use. When it is though, it will be good.
Re:Sunbird? (Score:5, Informative)
That's not quite it. Sunbird and Mozilla Calendar share the same codebase, and therefore have the same functionality and bugs. The difference between them is *only* packaging. Sunbird is packaged as a standalone app, while Mozilla Calendar is an extension for Firefox or Thunderbird.
Lightning, however, is a Thunderbird extention that puts the calendar UI directly in the Thunderbird window. The calendar provided by Sunbird/Mozilla Calendar uses a separate window. The group of products probably shares a codebase for handling calendar and related data, but the UI code is different between Lightning and the others. It's going to have its own share of bugs and features.
Re:Sunbird? (Score:2)
You'll find out they haven't forgot Sunbird. It seems Lightning is 'Sunbird within Thunderbird'. Correct me if I misunderstood
Re:Sunbird? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sunbird? (Score:3, Informative)
Lightning is a completely different UI, designed to integrate better with Thunderbird than the Calendar application does. It'll provide some of the same things that Outlo
What about (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about (Score:2)
Re:What about (Score:2)
Why should mail and calendar be integrated? (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand that the calendars for the people in the workgroup need to be synchronized, but is email really the best protocol for that? And if so, does it need to be integrated in the same client?
Re:Why should mail and calendar be integrated? (Score:2)
Re:Why should mail and calendar be integrated? (Score:2)
But if you're set against the idea, one of the good things about Mozilla calendar is that it can be used standalone (Sunbird) or integrated (Lightning).
Re:Why should mail and calendar be integrated? (Score:2)
I don't want to send a mail to all my collegues that I'm at the dentist next monday. Most of them couldn't care less. However, I want them to be able to see that I will not be available, if they try to arrange something that day.
Re:Why should mail and calendar be integrated? (Score:2)
Re:Why should mail and calendar be integrated? (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Why should mail and calendar be integrated? (Score:2)
I just hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
Sleek, fast and trustworthy are a few keywords I put on the current thunderbird, and which is why I use it.
If they have to do it, make it optional as a plugin or extension, as with every other major non-mail related feature.
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Informative)
Calendar Necessary to Uproot Outlook (Score:2, Insightful)
At least for corporations, people are tied to the clock/calendar. You can't disrupt the old tool until you can work with the old tool. Or, at the very least, be able to send meeting requests and import old calendar information into your new tool.
It is the small things like the Calendar and PowerPoint and file formats which let expensive software cling to a corporation like a bad fungus.
Re:Calendar Necessary to Uproot Outlook (Score:2)
Solaris 8 (Score:2)
Alternately, does anyone know if there are any Java based alternatives to Lightning? The default CDE calendar that's installed at work is ancient.
Schedule templates? (Score:5, Funny)
The Leveller
7:45AM-8:50AM - Worlds of Warcraft
8:50AM-8:53AM - Ninja fast shower, gotta get to work!
8:53AM-9:05AM - Drive to work, clock in late
9:05AM-11:30AM - Read and post to WoW forums from work computer
11:30AM-12:30PM - Lunch! Just enough time to get home and mob, try to get Enchanted Axe of Althar or something.
12:30PM-5:30PM - Do enough work to keep that ass boss off your back, sell some WoW gold on eBay.
5:30PM-6:00PM - Drive home, resolve to buy some groceries and make a real dinner
6:00PM-6:10PM - Realize that Jack in the Box is faster, just get something there.
6:10PM-1:00AM - Worlds of Warcraft
1:00AM-7:45AM - Fitful sleep, plagued by dreams where nobody can read your chat messages in game.
The GPLion
9:30AM - Wake up, play some TuxRacer.
9:32AM - Check for updates to KDE, hit slashdot.
9:50AM - Finish writing screed defending Stalman while untarring a new nightly build in the background.
9:55AM - Start a new kernel compiling, then head off to CS class.
10:00AM - Listen to stupid Microsoft-loving professor tell me about stuff I'll never need. What do I care about 'big-endian' crap, this is COMPUTER SCIENCE, not freakin' Gulliver's Travels.
11:15AM - Get out of class, eat the macaroni & cheese I brought in tupperware.
12:00PM-2:45PM - Various classes about stuff I'll never use. Why do I need an english class? I _SPEAK_ english!
3:00PM - 4:00PM - Spent telling the TA who runs the computer lab why their PSP is inferior to my Samsung phone that runs linux, demo java TuxRacer.
4:00PM-6:00PM - Kernel has finished compiling at home, spend time trying to get computer working again.
6:15PM - Post comment to blog about how easy it was to get the new kernel going, and how you don't understand the problems other people are having.
7:00PM-10:00PM - Xena marathon! Watch on my MythTV setup. With this transparent weather overlay over the screen, I can totally tell what the weather is like outside, even if the audio is out of sync, it's STILL better than a goddamned tivo.
10:00PM-11:00PM - Porn.
The Hipster
7:00AM - Wake up with gentle alarm clock
7:15AM - Bagel and LOX down at the coffee house.
8:00AM - Bicycle to work while listening to all my podcasts on my Apple iPod(tm)
9:00AM - Start work, be sure to check all my RSS feeds.
12:00PM - Lunch. Did someone say sushi?
1:00PM - Back to work, adjust my square DKNY glasses and buckle down for at least an hour of email, then back to websites.
2:00PM - Boba/Bubble tea break!
5:00PM - Outta work, begin bicycling home.
6:30PM - Get home.
7:00PM - Dinner time, zagats sez to try that place on 14th.
9:00PM - Start watching all my Tivo'd shows, all PBS of course. I don't keep the idiot box for anything but PBS. Oh, and maybe Lost, and the Simpsons, but don't tell.
Re:Schedule templates? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Schedule templates? (Score:2)
Hipster
8:20 AM - get hit by a car due to biking while listening to an iPod
Closer to an end-to-end solution. (Score:2)
But don't go looking for the one big server app that's going to be the "Exchange Killer" that goes with it. That's not how the open source world is answering that challenge. Exchange will not be a Goliath felled by David, it will be more like a Gulliver restrained by multiple Lilliputians. This is because p
Can I be the first to say (Score:2)
What's needed is better interprocess communication (Score:3, Interesting)
This is an old, old problem with UNIX. In the beginning, there were pipes, which are unidirectional. There were signals, which were badly botched in early UNIX, resulting in several redesigns, all different, with the end result that nobody could trust signals. Then came sockets, which were bidirectional but oriented towards talking to services on remote machines, not interprocess peer to peer communication locally. There's still no standard, always-there way for one program in the UNIX world to call another and get an answer back. There are about five CORBA implementations, there's OpenRPC, there's Java RMI, and there are a few other schemes not used much. But mostly, there's not much talking back and forth, other than at the file and pipe level or to a remote server.
I often wonder how UNIX history might have been different if a facility for this had been there from the early days. In UNIX, one program can invoke another, passing a set of command line arguments and environment variables. But all that comes back is a return code. How different it might have been if you got back output arguments. Then programs could have called other programs as subroutines.
Or if UNIX/Linux had had good interprocess communication from the early days.
stdin/stdout (Score:2)
Re:What's needed is better interprocess communicat (Score:2)
Sunbird (Score:2)
What do I gain (or lose) using the extension instead of the Sunbird client?
They do have their work cut out for them (Score:2)
The old way of calendaring is to have calendar on your PC/laptop that you then "sync" with your PDA. Nice, but it is possible to do much better.
Any real calendar app must store your data on the web, allow you to share events with selected other's calendars, and provide multiple easy ways of hooking up (adding events, seeing, and being notified) by the calendar.
So far, 30boxes and some others have come close to that.
I can share share my calendar with my wife so that we can add stuff to each other's calendars
Re:They do have their work cut out for them (Score:2)
I don't know, but why manage something as utilitarian as a calendaring system when you can have someone else do it for you and 200 million of your closest friends in a permanent, accessible, secure and scalable way?
Don't Build It In (Score:3, Insightful)
God I hope not. The whole point of splitting out Thunderbird and Firefox from the Uber Mozilla Suite was to keep each part simple, non bloated, and good at what they do on their own. Thunderbird is an email client, not a scheduling client. If people want to download an extension for scheduling, fine. But don't lather up Thunderbird with something that it probably doesn't need for most poeple.
Along the same lines, Firefox doesn't need to be a scheduling client either.
Calendar vs. Sunbird (Score:2)
Calendar is the calendar extension for Mozilla products such as Mozilla Firefox,Mozilla Thunderbird, Seamonkey and the Mozilla Application Suite.
Sunbird is the standalone form of the calendar extension, which means that it doesn't need one of the above mentioned applications to run. Sunbird and Calendar use the same base code so their functionality is virtually the same and they share the same bugs and bug fi
Too little (Score:2, Insightful)
Having a good calendar application in Mozilla would certainly be nice. But at this glacial speed of development, I don't see it going mainstream any time soon.
Re:its the biggest difference between Outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
Scheduling with multiple complex calendars? Meeting invitations and e-mail reminders seemlessly included (and able to be sent from one outlook client to another)?
A lot of that is based on the fact that you're using outlook as an exchange client.
I definitely believe that Exchange is a steaming pile. It crashes frequently and has severe problems when the data in it exceeds a certain size for no good reason. Occasionally it corrupts itself.
It takes an expert in Exchange to administer despite the fact that the tasks that it is designed to handle are relatively simple concepts. (In contrast, SQL Server, which does something far more complicated to understand is actually easier to administer, IMHO, because it mostly works right).
However, at a lot of places we're all stuck with it, and with Outlook, until we've got a complete scheduling and e-mail solution that has features that are close.
Re:its the biggest difference between Outlook (Score:2)
Re:its the biggest difference between Outlook (Score:5, Funny)
Firefox calendar extension; Sunbird issues (Score:2)
Re:its the biggest difference between Outlook (Score:2)
Re:its the biggest difference between Outlook (Score:2)
Re:Will it sync with Outlook Calender? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Will it sync with Outlook Calender? (Score:2)
However it doesn't seem to work when I accept the meeting.
Re:Digg.com (Score:2)
Estimated 5,873,100 visitor sessions in the last 30 days.
--
www.slashdot.org
Estimated 7,797,900 visitor sessions in the last 30 days.
(Source: metricsmarket.com)
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Looks to me like they're doing a-okay. Stop feeding trolls, you're no better with your weak attacks.
Re:Digg.com (Score:2)
Re:Integration (Score:2)
Browsing and email are the killer app for the internet.
Calendaring solutions / meeting scheduling plus newsgroups are the killer app for business.
Why not have a single application?
Bloat oh no! We can't expect people to download a 15 MB executable! I like having a email notification in my browser. I like having links and copy past handled effectively.