Call For A New Default Theme For Mozilla Sunbird

synopsis5 writes "The developers of Mozilla Sunbird, the standalone version of Mozilla Calendar, are looking for a new default theme and are asking the community to build a new one. Interested theme creators should read the guidelines posted in the MozillaZine Themes forum, which feature complete details. Submitted work must be licensed under the standard MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license and a rough showcase needs to be produced by Tuesday 13th July for the theme to be considered. A few showcases have already been brought forth and are discussed. Take a look!"

Comments

This will sound bad

[obeythefist]

But why aren't a lot of these open source projects labelled a little more clearly? Thankfully the topic actually mentions that Sunbird is a Calendar. Although you ask a guy on the street what "Firefox" is and they'll think it's a TV show. You ask them what Internet Explorer is and they'll tell you it's a web browser.

Wouldn't it help if it was called the "Sunbird Calendar" and "Firefox browser"?

Re:This will sound bad

[nine-times]

It may be off-topic and it's most likely to be offensive to some, but, personally, I think the whole 'Mozilla' project could benefit from a rebranding. I'm not saying ditch the 'Mozilla' brand, since it's well recognized and has a good connection with techies, but give the average business user some dinosaur icon labelled 'Mozilla' on their desktop, and they don't take it seriously enough.

Techies seem to dig the dinosaur and the penguin as a sort of an inside joke, but if you want to reach a larger audience, you have to drop the silly logos and fun code-names. Each application name, as the OP commented, should be easily identifiable in terms of what it does.

I'm not trying to troll or be offensive; I've just had a hard time convincing people that this "dinosaur program" or something called 'Mozilla Firefox' are "real web-browsers". Whenever I install Mozilla or Firefox on a non-techie's machine, I usually have to tell them that "It's Netscape- they just changed their name" before they'll actually run it. Firefox is too good a browser to be held back by a name.

In my opinion, that was the whole virtue of Netscape. You could take the Mozilla suite, change the graphics and give it a name that people know and trust, and know-nothings suddenly feel entirely comfortable trying it out.

All well and good...

[skinfitz]

But will it talk to Exchange?

Re:All well and good...

[skinfitz]

Well put it this way - if it connects to Exchange (reliably) then a lot of people can start seriously rolling out Linux to the desktop.

Re:Excellent

[RAMMS EIN]

``a cross-platform calendaring app that integrates with the best web browser and e-mail client in the world! Who could fail to get excited about that?''

People who already have a web browser, email client, and calender app that work for them?

Re:Sunbird

[bahamat]

Sunbird would get more attention if

1. the deveopers gave it more attention
2. it didn't suck

The last time I tried sunbird as a standalone app it couldn't even perform basic tasks like adding an event. The last time I installed it as part of Firefox or Thunderbird it wrecked the app so bad I had to delete it, my prefs, and reinstall.

Just for the sake of giving it another shot I just installed Sunbird into Thunderbird. It looks nice, but nothing happens when I try to create a calendar.

For Mac OS X there's iCal, for windows there's eventSherpa Lite. Unfortunately, there is still no program utilizing this open standard on Linux.