Mozilla Calls on User Community Today for Testing

lisah writes "As Mozilla prepares to release updates for its calendar applications Sunbird and Lightning, project developers are calling on the user community to participate in the final stages of testing. The Mozilla Calendar Team has proclaimed today as Test Case Writing Day and users worldwide are encouraged to participate. Mozilla developer Clint Talbert tells NewsForge that today's event is a pre-cursor to the Calendar Test Day Mozilla will hold later this month prior to the final release of version 0.3."

Profit!

[andrewman327]

From TFA: "There will be a reward for the two people who write the most test cases. They will each receive a $25 gift certificate to the mozilla store.

I like the idea of having the users contribute like this. Something that I really like about Mozilla is the fact that its users are given a big voice. Not all OSS asks for so much input from non-coding users. I always look forward to new releases, too, as the organization seems to wait to release instead of rushing crap.

Just out of interest...

[Yuioup]

Is Mozilla going to incorporate automated testing into the project?

Y

Excellent testing model

[jhfry]

Who better to test something then those who will use it. Now of course there are betas and automatic reporting that also help... but there is nothing like the developers asking their users for feedback in a very humble way like this.

It's their way of saying, our software is probably full of holes but with your help we can make it better.

MS tried that with XP and their error reporting feature. From what I understand, their success was amazing with that tool... however I never felt someone say that they felt appreciated for submiting their error reports.

Gotta love companies who realize that it's the users not the software that make their product great. Give users what they want, make them feel like they are appreciated, and most of all respect them; keys to any truely great software (or any other product for that matter). Now if only we could get the RIAA and the rest of the media companies bent on making fair use mean fairly usable to understand what customers want.

Re:Lots of Calendar news lately

[mrchaotica]

I would guess that "CalDAV" is shorthand for "WebDAV serving iCal-format files."

Does this Mozilla software already talk to WebDAV calendar stores - can it read current Apple iCal calendars published via WebDAV?

Yes

By the way, iCal isn't an Apple format; although it was invented there, it's been submitted as a standard IIRC.

Re:Re-neter all your dates again, I suppose

[yaphadam097]

I've had the same problem, which is why I started using Yahoo calendar and now Google calendar instead. Still, I am hopeful that the final release will meet my needs better than these do (Though the advantage of having a calendar available on any browser is significant.)

Not me...

[NineNine]

Last time I tried a Sunbird supposedly beta release, it was so buggy that is just wasn't useable (at all). It would lose data, scramble it around, crash randomly, use 100% of my processor, etc. I was permanently scared away from Sunbird if that's what they called a beta. I would've loved to use Sunbird, but that was a long time ago, and we've since moved onto Outlook because we 1. were tired of waiting and 2. didn't have anything remotely useable in the meantime.

Re:Lots of Calendar news lately

[Kunta Kinte]

Will Open Connector allow for synchronisation as well or will it only provide import/export?

It does allow you to view/modify events on a CalDAV server in Outlook as if it were on an Exchange server.

i.e. can I synchronise my work calender (which uses Outlook/Exchange) to a second server and sync that one with my own PC/phone/PDA/whatever?

That's the plan, though things are buggy still. We haven't completed sharing, though individual calendars work.

The connector is different from import/export filters. It's replaces Outlook's local message store and transport storage layers entirely with its own implementation that supports CalDAV. This is basically the approach Lotus, etc. take to provide Outlook access to their servers.

Re:Not so interested

[SilentTristero]

> Business users will continue to stick with Outlook

Don't be so sure. We're a small mostly-Windows shop (Win/Linux/Mac for developers, Windows for the admin/sales/mktg folks) and we have no M$ servers. Linux-based mail/dns/fileserver infrastructure. Everyone uses Tbird/Ffox, no IE. Outlook doesn't really play well into that kind of environment; so we REALLY need shareable calendars. Right now Chandler & Sunbird aren't far enough along for real business use (at least not a couple of months ago); even event notification was unreliable in Sunbird. iCal is OK but Mac-only. Vista for us is a far-off upgrade.

So at least some of us are very interested in recent Chandler and Sunbird progress.

Re:Lots of Calendar news lately

[n4t3]

Isn't it more unfortunate that it took Microsoft almost 10 years (Outlook 2007) to fully support that standard, when as you correctly point out a Microsoft employee is listed as one of it's principal creators?

Re:My test case...

[littlematt]

> Sunbird and Lightning never ditched the iCal support (.ics files) in favor of a custom format.
True. Go to File > Export... and look! It's trying to save as an .ics file!

> What they did, was to change the internal storage format from .ics to a SQLite...database...for performance reasons...
Performance wasn't the only reason for the switch. In fact, in some particular situations, the SQLite backend is actually slower than 0.2's .ics backend. However when manipulating files with hundreds or thousands of events, SQLite beats the pants off of .ics. In addition, we wanted to be able to support calendar stores and servers (such as CalDAV and WCAP) that have features which can't necessarily be expressed in .ics (at least without doing a lot of ugly X-MOZ-WHIZBANGFEATURE stuff), and by using SQLite we are free to do that.

-lilmatt