Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla.org Announces Open Source Calendar
Mike Potter writes: "According to an article at Mozillazine.org, Mozilla.org will be releasing an open source calendar. "Thanks to an extremely generous offer of code from OEone Corporation, the new calendar project will have a significant codebase to start from. OEone make Penzilla, an operating environment for internet devices based on Linux and Mozilla. ... For more information on, and a technical description of Penzilla Calendar, see OEone's website." I think we'll be seeing a lot more applications built with Mozilla, now that its stable." Mundane as it may sound, with tabs in place (and behaving more sanely), a good calendar is probably my most-wished-for Mozilla feature. The screenshots certainly bode well for this one.
Awesome! I always thought Thursday was a stupid name. I think i'll call it Mikesday.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Isn't this creeping featuritis? All I want for Christmas is Mozilla 1.0...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
But my main gripe is the interactivity of the new PIM's, like Outlook Express in Office XP. They allow one's data to be inspected by one's superior, and make for an invasion of personal space by the hierarchy at work.
One of my girlfriends Joselle had to cancel a date with me because her boss inserted a work appointment at the same time, without notice, and she had to obey.
The only way to be truly provate and control your schedule is to have it written down privately. Computers allow for the domination of one's calendar by the digital elite.
I just did a search for "calendar" on freshmeat... 131 projects found
Do we really need mozilla to include yet another thing which we can just find somewhere else? Before we know it, Mozilla will include its own kernel! And they are wondering why 1.0 is soooo far off?
Gerv has stated on MozillaZine that while the intent is to get it into the tree so interested outside developers can start messing around with it, they won't be actively working on it until after Mozilla 1.0 is released.
Want an *excellent* calendar? See: http://korganizer.kde.org/
e s. gif
. gi f
Korganizer has alarms, ical import, html export, kmail integration, and more. And it isn't massively bloated by Mozilla things like XUL, XPCOM and it's nasty brethren.
Some screenshots:
http://korganizer.kde.org/screenshots/main.gif
http://korganizer.kde.org/screenshots/event.gif
http://korganizer.kde.org/screenshots/preferenc
http://korganizer.kde.org/screenshots/webexport
http://korganizer.kde.org/screenshots/find.gif
Use it enjoy it, and contribute to it.
Read further. This won't get developed until AFTER Mozilla 1.0.
As for browser/calendar integration, I think it may be more associated with the email client than the browser.
The project is a bit far fro my immediate scope - but is teh system compatible with non-gregorian calendar systems? I know most of peopel from live the Gregorian way, but there are a few of us that use something different - like the 13-moon calendar that the planet acutally functions on - not some arbitrary separations of nomenclature.
13 moon positions and 20 sun positions over 13 moon cycles that are each 28 days in length. Which also happens to be the cycle which most females who are 'regular' have their menstruation periods by. This was the calendar system of the Mayans and happens to be the only system which acurately measures the procession of the Equinoxes - which has a much larger periodicity than most people think about....
-shpoffo
First of all, I think they're donating to Mozilla because it's built on Moz technology (XUL, etc.). But since it will presumably be GPL (like the rest of Mozilla), there's no reason Gnome or KDE can't use it. What does it matter if it was donated "to" them? It's GPL, Gnome/KDE are GPL, if it's good, put it in there!
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
Despite deploying and building our systems on UNIX platforms utilizing BSD/GPL systems, we have an NT 4.0 network with Exchange 5.5 running.
Why?
We need the coordination ability of Outlook. I haven't seen anything for UNIX that compares. The ability to schedule meetings, observe schedules, and otherwise coordinate things is extremely useful. I would love to replace the Exchange Server and backend infrastructure with Free Solutions, but they aren't there yet.
I use IE and Mozilla as my browsers (IE 6 is pretty flaky), but I am stuck on a Windows 2000 desktop (albeit with 3-4 SSH sessions going) because of collaboration tools, accounting tools, and office tools.
This is a step in the right direction for those looking to build Free solutions.
Alex
When will someone release a calendar/scheduling server (like MS Exchange) for linux. This is a MAJOR thing holding it back from the corporate desktop. Yes, Lotus Notes and MS Exchange both have web interfaces, but if you've used them you would know that they suck.
PHPGroupware is sort of cool, but it's still browser based, and while that's nice from an accessibility standpoint, it sucks from a usability standpoint.
Step 1: Build Server
Step 2: Build clients which work with the server
Not the other way around.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
However this means, that an Palm conduit for pilot-link to synchronize the calendar and the address book of Mozilla would be essential.
Anyway, an conduit for the Mozilla address book would be great to have now. Does anyone know if there are plans to provide such an conduit?
Mozilla is more cross platform than Gnome or KDE (i.e., it runs on Windows at least as well as Linux, from what I've seen). If OEone wants to target Windows users, then using XPCOM and the other Mozilla technologies make more sense than Gnome or KDE. Remember, they're not using the Mozilla browser, but rather the cross platform toolkit that the browser also happens to be built on top of.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Does anyone know of an open-source calendar SERVER that supports iCal, and actually sorta works? It looks like ReefKnot has a ways to go, though it looks promising.
include $sig;
1;
"Thanks to an extremely generous offer of code from OEone Corporation?" I thought it was morally wrong to not offer code to everyone for free. We wouldn't say "thanks to an extremely generous offer of not stealing" would we?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
What are all these complaints about bloat and never-will-be-released 1.0?
Free software is about freedom and choice. Stop discouraging side projects just because you don't like it.
I wondered when Emacs would get embedded in Mozilla ;-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I want my calendar available to me wherever I am - home, work, on the road - using a client-side solution is pointless in this respect. The same goes for mail. A service like Yahoo Calendar is the way to go - have your calendar wherever, on whatever browser. This seems self-evident.
heh.. Course not. Gates was born on Gatemas the holeyest day of the year.
Anyone know why they use Windows 3000 as a prison guard? It always locks up -- heh..
Rod Taylor
We now have clients a plenty, but no way to share selected parts of our calendar with groups or individuals. A server would be really great and also be a step on the quest for a mSexChange replacement. What are the open standards for calendar sharing ?
Mozilla is not just a browser. The purpose of Mozilla is to provide a higher quality software base for the Netscape Communications Suite, that's why the Mozilla source was opened in the first place. A communications suite certainly has need of a calendar app, and therefore this third party add-on does add value to the Mozilla package.
It wasn't given to KDE or Gnome directly because it wasn't designed for KDE or Gnome. And why would it be? OEone is a company, and companies want their product to be available to the maximum number of people possible. Mozilla targets almost 100% of desktops, more than any other software I know of. KDE is used on maybe 1% of desktops. I don't think it's any mystery why a company would design their software to work with Mozilla rather than KDE.
It was extremely gracious and generous of OEone to release the source to their code. It is a gift to the community! We should say thank you, and if it isn't useful to you, either do the work to make it useful or shut the hell up.
If this is the kind of attitude companies are met with when they decide to open their source code, is it any wonder so many companies don't?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
It started out as an application framework and has stayed there throughout... as it happens, there is a browser application on top of the framework.
After years of licensing expensive, bug-ridden, proprietary calendars, I can finally move to an open-source calendar.
Just in time, as I was sick of MicrosoftMonday(tm) also starting late. Further, their new licensing requires me to upgrade to MS2002 by Jan 1, 2002 at the latest.
Now, I can upgrade when I feel like it (I won't need 2002 until sometime late 2005). And since I'll have the source, I can add an extra hour to all my days, an extra day to all my months, and find a work-around to my birthday (so it only happens once every 3 years).
Open Source Rules!
:)
ShoutingMan.com
Will that, like, have nude pinups of RMS and ESR?
Yum! I want one for my wall!
-Kasreyn
P.S. YES, THAT WAS A JOKE, YOU SICK FREAKS.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Did you not notice the bit about it being developed by an outside organisation? It is merely being included into the Mozilla CVS tree so others can work on it. It's not taking people away from working on the browser, so I'm not sure why people have such a problem with it.
I've been evaluating Mac OS X for a few months. Our applications are primarily web based, though we do Java and are adding Qt to the technology base.
We had each programmer with a Linux box and Win2K box. Now it is hit or miss. If you need/want a dedicated server, its yours. Otherwise, you use a development server.
Mac OS X offers some interesting possibilities. One system, with a full BSD subsystem (adequate for us), as well as an Outlook Client and MS Office (coming to native OS X, "Real Soon Now"). When those are released, we're really going to consider Powerbooks instead of the Compaq Armada's with docking stations.
Giving everyone a full Unix desktop (complete with CVS client) as well as Office Productivity apps would be great.
VirtualPC would probably even be sufficient for the few Windows only apps that we need. (Test the site on IE/Windows, Quickbooks for my accounting, etc.).
I realize that if you are doing real Unix coding, you need the Sparcs. But for those of us that just need a Unix-like environment, it is a sufficient development solution.
Alex
Mozilla is not GPL. Some parts of it are available under an MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license.
Gerv
ermm a seerver would not be a bundled product since it has to run on a remote machine....and the ability to interact with it would not be that much code.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
13 moon positions and 20 sun positions over 13 moon cycles that are each 28 days in length.
Would that be the 27.3 day sidereal Lunar month or the 29.5 day synodic Lunar month that you've got the length wrong for?
The ratio of the lunar month (either way you measure) to the year is an irrational number that changes as the moon's orbit recedes. Any calendar that makes a real attempt to follow both cycles won't be good for much except driving people nuts.
Your criticism is well founded.
But, make yourself heard. For starters, i'm not aware of vCal (or iCal and vCal) bugs. These are routed to the Core dev team here. (I'm on the Mac dev team)
The Motif 5.0 client is currently nearing ship date. The newly rebuilt team has been very hard at work, catching back with the Mac and Windows features. Previous CEO, here, had killed the Motif client a couple of years ago. He got replaced with a saner one that put the motif client back on track. Surely enough, because of the 1 year (or so) set back, they have been playing catch up for many months.
It's interesting to note that the Mac client 5.2 is pretty much the same as versionn 5.1, except it runs nativelly in Mac OS X (aka, carbonized). So, by now, the motif client really isn't that far behind.
(I'm not sure I should be saying all that, but I don't this this as armful).
The new Linux client (still Motif) is a hell of a lot better than it used to. Really. It brings it on par with version 5.0 of the mac client, plus some stuff from the 5.2.1 client. This includes the new connection manager stuff etc.
The web site doesn't comment on unreleased products, unless they publicly go beta. That's why there's no mention of the upcoming Linux client.
As for the vCal/iCal stuff, there's been much improvements in those core libs since the 4.x Motif client.
I beleive the Motif client will ship around december. And (get this!) there will be a public beta next tuesday! (I just learnt that myself).
By the way, please DO voice your concerns through the appropriate channels (see the web site).
I wont be much use in this regard, being on the mac dev team, as opposed to marketing or lord know what.
Gotta use my iDisk for something! Should be nice and zippy.
calendar.jpg
calendar_add_event.jpg
calendar_day_view.jpg
calendar_week_view.jpg
wordp.jpg
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Are they going to add MozColander as well?
fencepost
just a little off
Umm... That's because Emacs doesn't do any one of those things as well as stand alone programs written for that purpose.
Mozilla on the other hand is:
1. A cross platform framework.
2. A browser application written on TOP of that framework.
Composer is an editor written on top of the framework
Messenger is a mailer written on top of the framework
Chatzilla is an IRC app written on top of the framework
This Calendaring is another app written on top of the framework.
You don't want one? then don't build it (or don't install it)
Each of these apps is a seperate beasie, that can run alone (without the others). Each is intended to do one thing, and do it well (Browsing, Web Editing, Mail, and PIM). But, in the unix style of things - they all talk to each other very effectivly. This is useful, as the apps working together creates a package that is more then the sum of the parts.
Mozilla is my favorite browser, Messanger is my favorite Mailer. I can take or leave the current incarnation of Composer.
As other apps start working well in the Mozilla environment, I will pick and choose those which I choose to use - but the fact they all work well together makes the suite more effective.
Don't front on people's ability to try and work on tools that they want. Mozilla is gonna be released for 1.0 when it is released, and this will likely not change that date by so much as a week. I want (as many people) a suite of internet tools that function well with each other, and make my working life easier, instead of having to spend the time finding the bloody setting that lets my e-mail program launch links to my preferred browser, or dealing with any of the other annoyances of trying to get two packages to work well together that were not designed from the beginning to do so....
- The unexamined life is not worth leading -
There aren't 13 lunar "months" in a solar year. Indeed there is no resonance between the two at all.
However from the linked site you seem only tenously acquainted with reality, apparently not enough to ever actually look at a lunar calendar.
Score: -3 (troll with pseudo-science & bad math!)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I wonder if Lotus Domino (the server backend to Lotus Notes) could be tricked into supporting these RFCs? or at least if we could create a bridge layer for those of us at companies that use Domino....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I love my Moz, but know unfortunate juxtapositions when I see them...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I know there are countless users of open source software that don't write code, I'm one of them. I realized that I had 2 choices when it came to getting Linux to do exactly what I want, either find someone who can code and get them to do the work, or learn to code and do it myself. I chose to learn to code, so I bought some books and I'm struggling through it. Sure it's tiresome to hear "write it yourself", but it's more tiresome to hear people bitching about something that's being given to them for free! I'm tired of listening to all these pathetic whiners saying "why'd they do it that way or not do it this way and why doesn't it have this feature..." The vast majority of the code is produced by people working on their own time and for their own reasons, and they provide their code to the rest of the world for free just because they are cool guys. They certainly don't do it to support a bunch of 1337 h4x0rs whos only contribution to the community is spewing flames at Windows users!
I'm not suggesting that you or the other guy are that bad, but Christ, show some fucking gratitude when somebody gives you something!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Readers: Yay! Go open-source! We like calendars in web browsers!
Slashdot: Microsoft has announced they'll be putting a calendar app in Internet Explorer!
Readers: Boo! Fuck Microsoft, fuck them up their stupid asses! Browsers shouldn't have calendars! Browsers should browse! If everything was open-source, this wouldn't have happened!
I have one problem with this statement, and that is the use of the word "need". It treats Linux like a business, which it isn't. SuSE and Red Hat are businesses, and if you're looking for somewhere to suggest features, those are likely excellent places to start. I suppose that would be the third option to the two I mentioned before. It would certainly be nice to have a better way to address the needs of the average user. I would love to see a site where I could donate money for a feature, and other people who wanted that same feature could donate also, until the project is worth enough for someone to take it on. I recall an article on /. a while back that brought up this idea, and I have seen developer sites with messages posted to the effect of "I will pay someone $3000 if they can add [feature] to [project]" (unfortunately I can't remember where I saw that and I haven't run across anything like it recently).
I would even be interested in starting a site to do this from, but I don't have the resources to do it myself. Initial investment would include a server(s) that can at least pretend to handle the initial slashdoting when the service is opened, and some cash to open an account with a descent interest rate. My plan is this: the donations are made by [check, credit card, paypal, whatever] and held in this interest bearing account. When a project is completed, the triumphant coder get's a check equal to the donations and the site keeps the interest to cover overhead. Will it work? I don't know. It depends on how popular the service becomes. Worst case would be that people don't choose to use it, next worst is the site has to take a small percentage of the reward to help cover costs.
I worked for a company a while back that was a facilitator for 1031 delayed exchanges for aircraft, exchange meaning trade for like item, like trading one plane for another (you could also do this with houses and other big ticket items). The delayed exchange allowed you to sell the plane and keep that money tax free for the purchase of another plane within a year (as I recall, I was just doing data entry). The money had to be held in escrow by a third party (the facilitator) in order for it to be tax free, but the facilitator requirement was removed a few years ago. This particular company's fee was one quarter of one percent (.25%) of the amount held.
We wouldn't need office space, as the servers could be in my house (my lines are capable of 6M DSL, but my wallet isn't :( , another reason I can't go it alone on this). If anyone's seriously interested in something like this, drop me a line. I read all responses to my /. posts, the email above is valid (save /.'s anti-spam mangling) and the link on my user page will give you my daytime phone number (ask for Pete). If you'd rather steal my idea and do it yourself, go for it. All I ask is that you send a thank you my way, it doesn't even have to be publicly acknowledged.
I would love to see Linux dominate the desktop as well, and that's where my fledgling hacking skills are aimed. The "code it yourself" response is a direct result of so many coming to open source expecting to get something for nothing. That isn't what it's about, a contribution is still required for everything to work smoothly, but that contribution doesn't have to be monetary. I haven't seen the statement that "linux is only free if your time is worthless" lately, but it's still equally valid.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.