Mozilla Releases Mozilla Sunbird 0.2

Gentu writes "Along with the new Mozilla-Japan initiative and the release of Mozilla 1.8a3 today, the Mozilla team released the first 'official' beta release of Mozilla Sunbird, version 0.2, a stand-alone calendaring application (similar to Apple's iCal). There are two flavors of this project, one that works as a ~700 KB plugin to Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla (titled Mozilla Calendar) and the ~8 MB stand-alone calendaring application, Mozilla Sunbird (rate the apps over at GnomeFiles.org). These builds are the first to feature a new default theme, a new logo and the customizable toolbar functionality. Note that Sunbird is still an experimental technology preview that contain bugs, but it is pretty stable."

Comments

Some of the new Mozilla 1.8a3 features

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Readme:

• At-rule for matching on site/document URL. Among other things, this makes site-specific user style rules possible (Great for changing it.slashdot.org's color scheme!)
• Undetected document.all support has been added to Mozilla (Good for some dumb IE-only sites)
• Support for translucent windows on Windows and GTK2 (Oohh!)
• Preliminary support for CSS columns has been checked in (Too bad IE won't support this for years, if ever)
• The new npruntime plugin scriptability API (Good, good)
• Users can now disable CSS via Use Style > None or a global preference (Well, they can't all be exciting)

Re:Some of the new Mozilla 1.8a3 features

[jZnat]

At-rule for matching on site/document URL. Among other things, this makes site-specific user style rules possible (Great for changing it.slashdot.org's color scheme!)

Maybe it'd be helpful for this to be an extension until they add it to Firefox and for Mozilla 1.7 users. The only thing you can do with M1.7 and FF0.9.3 is add a patch to it, but most people don't want to download and install Cygwin, then wait 1-3 hours for it to fully recompile. =S

Re:Some of the new Mozilla 1.8a3 features

[medeii]

Read the damn bug yourself. (Note: copy and paste the link, Bugzilla rejects visits from Slashdot.) It is not designed to encourage bad writing: support for document.all will ONLY activate if the web developer really was stupid and did not use any sort of test to detect it.

Additional discussion can be seen from the Mozillazine article published weeks ago.

no Palm support

[js7a]

The calendar does not yet synch with your Palm Pilot.
-- Sunbird FAQ

No synching with outlook clients (e.g. Pocket PCs), either, just Outlook .ics format export-import.

Re:no Palm support

[ptbarnett]

If I can figure out what the heck a webDAV enabled webserver is, maybe I can drop yahoo...

http://www.webdav.org/

Re:no Palm support

[deputydink]

apache with mod_webdav is what you want. It works out of the box on Mac actually, since Apple's iCal is built on webDav, which means they'd be compatible (sort of)

I think it works out of the box on Fedora as well.

Pretty much any modern web server can do webdav, or has a module that can do it.

Re:no Palm support

[irix]

Sync support is planned eventually, but some of us are starting to look at it now.

As usual...

[almostmanda]

The logos are adorable.

And file compatible with Apples iCal too ..

[Macka]

From their web site:

iCal and the Mozilla Calendar use the same file format, so events from one should show up without problem in the other. You can also subscribe to the list of events on Apple's website if you like.

This is great news, and should help to promote both applications.

Re:Strange math....

[TheUncleBob]

The Mac version is 8M, windows installer is 5.9M, and windows Zip 5.5M, so I guess the maths is

Firefox Installer (4.8M) + Plugin (700k) = Sunbird installer (5.9M) - Nightly/debug extras (400k)

It's got my vote

[inflex]

I've been using the Mozilla Calendar for the last few days (strangely conincidental one might think) and I'm definately liking it. I'm using it for tracking a lot of business activities, so it's especially nice how it issues email notices and allows you to repeat things even "once a year".

While there's nothing spectacular about the calendar tool it does do the job and so far it has been running without issue the last 5 days without requiring a restart.

I'm further delighted about this because it means I don't have to walk down the path of Evolution just to get a calendar. One last thing though - when (if ever) will Mozilla mail change away from using .mbx/mailbox files and move to something like what Sylpheed uses (1 file per email).

PLD.

Re:It's got my vote

[Spaceman40]

One last thing though - when (if ever) will Mozilla mail change away from using .mbx/mailbox files and move to something like what Sylpheed uses (1 file per email).

One possible reason for the .mbx is that NTFS is so freakin slow at operations involving many small files. ReiserFS rocks at it (as well as a couple other non-FAT/NTFS systems), but all the Windows people (>80% base) would be left wondering where all their speed went.

Now if MS would create a GOOD filesystem (see ReiserFS 4 - maybe they could just grab that!), it would be more feasable for those people with 3,000 e-mails that they don't want to bulk delete.

(btw - I work a helpdesk, I know about those people.)

Sunbird has no support for proxies - no worries!

[hallucination]

If, like me, you need to use a proxy server in Sunbird, but found that it doesn't allow you to set one up, you have two choices:

Use the thunderbird/firefox calendar plugin instead

OR

Copy the network.proxy parts of your thunderbird/firefox prefs.js file into your sunbird prefs.js file.

Re:Possibly a very important project for Open Sour

[Senjutsu]

(though there could be something already out there... I just don't know about it ;) ).

Ximian Evolution is the Managerial, Outlook-esque product for Linux that you seem to be missing.

Re:Strange math....

[jsebrech]

The firefox installer skims off a few megs by using 7zip compression (which is why the linux and mac builds are so much bigger, no 7zip). I would imagine the sunbird installer exe isn't built with 7zip support yet.

Re:good news

[Erwos]

Huh?

Apple's using KHTML, pal. Nothing to do with Moz.

Linux+Moz, maybe.

-Erwos

Etymology of Mozilla

[sbszine]

Well what can you expect when the entire project is apparently named after a giant, fire breathing lizard?

Intarweb folk history has it that the word Mozilla is a contraction of Mosaic-Killer (with a nod to Godzilla, of course).

Re:Open Contacts format

[Ramsed]

vCard ?

Re:Open Contacts format

[Just Some Guy]

Well, Mozilla, KAddressBook, and OpenLDAP support LDIF. That seems like a pretty feature-complete standard for sharing directory information.

Re:Still lacks most important feature: useful alar

[helix400]

A minimize to tray extension is in the works that would help this problem out to a degree.

Minimize To Tray Extension

The extension works pretty well for Firefox and Thunderbird, and if/when Sunbird allows extensions, it will be extended to work with that too. This of course means Sunbird/Calendar would always be running, able to send out alarms, but not taking up lots of room on the taskbar. At the moment, the minimize to tray extension is only for Windows, and it's not a perfect fix, but it may help out some people who just want any solution for this issue.

Re:gecko

[mh101]

But only for Sunbird though... There's no "plugin" version of Thunderbird for if you already have Firefox installed.