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Call For A New Default Theme For Mozilla Sunbird

Posted by timothy on from the snide-remark-about-rendering dept.

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!"

16 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. This will sound bad by obeythefist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"?

    --
    I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
    1. Re:This will sound bad by synopsis5 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Your information is outdated. Firefox and Thunderbird won't go through another name change again. Three name changes for Firefox (mozilla/browser -> Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox) and one name change for Thunderbird (Minotaur -> Thunderbird) are clearly enough. You can't build up a successful brand, which is recognized by people if you keep on changing the name every few months.

    2. Re:This will sound bad by FictionPimp · · Score: 5, Funny

      Firefox: The act of lighting a small animal on fire and letting it go loose to discover new areas in the world you would of never traveled too before.

      Thank sounds plain enough to me.

    3. Re:This will sound bad by synopsis5 · · Score: 2, Informative

      The site (I guess you mean the roadmap) is outdated and has been for outdated for nearly a year. An update has been promised a couple of times but never delivered.

      But one thing is clear:
      Neither Firefox nor Thunderbird nor Sunbird will be renamed when they reach 1.0

    4. Re:This will sound bad by homer_ca · · Score: 2

      You're damn right. Try explaining to a newbie the difference between ISP, web browser and web site when they complain their Internet doesn't work.

      Techie: Try going to the web page 'www.blah.com'.
      Newbie: How do I do that?
      Technie: Run Internet Explorer and type 'www.blah.com' into the address line.
      Newbie: But I don't use Internet Explorer, I use Earthlink.

      and so on and so on....

    5. Re:This will sound bad by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.

    6. Re:This will sound bad by Psymunn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I know why they did it but it would have been nice if Firefox was stil Firebird... you know... for consistancy
      Or they could just change everything else to Thunderfox and Sunfox...
      Yeah... I think Sunbird deserved it's own animal group prehaps. Whatever, Mozilla is the one comapny that seems to be able to pull of inconsistant naming and improve their brand identity becausee of it (at least among geeks)

      --
      The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
  2. A Hidden Treasure? by erinacht · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is news to me! I use my palm desktop software for contact management and I'm quite happy with it/reluctant to change, but I like the fact that my happy pair of Firebird and Thunderbird could be complimented by Sunbird (probably to be changed to Fitbird or such...)
    I'll download it tonight and give it a whirl, I seem to remember a palm sync thing with old netscape so I'm presuming this is still possible...
    It does look a bit ugly right enough, a new theme based on firefox/thunderbird would be welcome.

  3. Charamel ? by theefer · · Score: 3, Informative

    In my opinion, the greatest, cutest Firefox/Thunderbird theme is Charamel. It'd be great if they would make a Sunbird theme as well.

    --
    theefer
    1. Re:Charamel ? by DeadSea · · Score: 3, Informative

      The buttons are too big in Charamel. I prefer pinball.

  4. All well and good... by skinfitz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But will it talk to Exchange?

    1. Re:All well and good... by skinfitz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  5. Not that bad... by mikelang · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The "marketing name" should be easy to remember and have unique association with the project.
    "Sunbird" is just one rare word.
    Everybody talks about "Sunbird calendar app" anyway, so why to increase the length of name?

  6. Re:iCal by synopsis5 · · Score: 3, Informative

    iCal is the native calendar format that Sunbird uses. See this faq entry. Try it out. You can easily import iCal calendars and subscribe to them. Some calendars to which you can subscribe to are available on this page.

    For the more technical guys:
    Sunbird uses libical as its calendar engine. This library is available under the MPL or the LGPL.

  7. Re:Excellent by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ``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?

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  8. Re:Sunbird by bahamat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.