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

[synopsis5]

Your information is outdated.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.

Re:This will sound bad

[FictionPimp]

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.

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.

Charamel ?

[theefer]

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

Re:Charamel ?

[DeadSea]

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

All well and good...

[skinfitz]

But will it talk to Exchange?

Re:iCal

[synopsis5]

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.