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Mozilla Lightning 0.1 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the delorean-time-machine-not-included dept.

Mini-Geek writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Lightning 0.1 is released. Lightning is a new Mozilla-made calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird that will eventually (once it becomes more mature and stable) be built into Thunderbird. From the article: 'The Lightning Project is a redesign of the Calendar component. Its goal is to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Mozilla Thunderbird.'"

7 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Mail + Calendar?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why must calendar apps be merged with mail apps? Seriously?

    1. Re:Mail + Calendar?! by From+A+Far+Away+Land · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The Outlook reason is that you can notify others by email when you'll be booking a room or away for a meeting.

      I don't understand hy the integration is taking so long. Sunbird has been around for a year or more and it's slow as molassas in February. I try to use it but it's such a hog that it pains me to leave it running. It should be 500Kb big, and open in 2 seconds on a P4. This is 2006, we should be demanding applications that open in blazing speeds, not more features.

      --
      Oh You POS
    2. Re:Mail + Calendar?! by rosciol · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While I agree with a lot of the separation of function items that people brought to light, I think that the reason, besides the fact that Microsoft did it first, is because a calendar application that's not interfaced in a convenient manner to a communications mechanism is not nearly so useful as one that is. Outlook Calendar wouldn't be used at all if it weren't true that I could send out a meeting invite to a hundred people, whose calendars I just checked, and receive responses. Unless you're going to integrate an e-mail backbone to a calendaring application, which puts you in the same problem in reverse, having tight integration of a calendaring application with its natural mate, a communications application for coordination, is actually a pretty reasonable approach. Offline calendars are always going to suffer from this problem, because every person you want to coordinate with will need specialized software and will need to be using your calendaring application (yes, I understand that is the case for basically every calendar+mail out there). To me, the easiest way to get away from the whole mess is to move to online calendar systems. Hyperlinks are already fully integrated into standard e-mail functionality, so online calendar systems have an existing usable integration mechanism, no proprietary anything required. And online calendars make sense for a whole slew of other reasons as well. When's Google's calendaring application going to be done anyway?

  2. Pocket PC Compatability by alphax45 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Too bad my pocket PC will only properly sync with Outlook. Althoug to be honest Outlook 2003 is not that bad. I would still like to try an open source based e-mail client, but until it will sync with my PDA correctly I can't make the switch.

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    K Man
    1. Re:Pocket PC Compatability by hhghghghh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Too bad my pocket PC will only properly sync with Outlook. Althoug to be honest Outlook 2003 is not that bad. I would still like to try an open source based e-mail client, but until it will sync with my PDA correctly I can't make the switch. Blame either the makers of PockerPC or the makers of Outlook for that. You'd almost think they're conspiring to prevent people from being able to switch..

  3. Why should mail and calendar be integrated? by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    At work we use GroupWise, and I find the integration most annoying. There is no connection between when I want to check my calendar, and when I want to send or read mail. Not to mention that I hate the GroupWise mail client, and use another when possible. I also hate the GroupWise calendar client, but I don't know if there are alternatives (I obviously need access to the information entered by our secretary, and she need to se the meetings I have entered).

    I understand that the calendars for the people in the workgroup need to be synchronized, but is email really the best protocol for that? And if so, does it need to be integrated in the same client?

  4. I just hope by norton_I · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I just hope they don't make thunderbird suck in the process. All I really want is a program that does mail that doesn't suck, and thunderbird is currently the closest I can find.