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Mozilla Lightning 0.1 Released
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.'"
I'm using it at home already. Screenshots at my blog.
I thought lightning comes before thunder.
If I found in my own ranks that a certain number of guys wanted to cut my throat, I'd make sure that I cut their throat.
Why must calendar apps be merged with mail apps? Seriously?
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.
K Man
ConsultingFair.com
Anyone remember this from like a year ago? I've switched from Windows to Linux, and I use Evolution just for its calendar feature (I've been using Gmail for my email with Firefox for at least a year now). It's great how it integrates with GNOME's calendar and shows appointments and the like.
Lightning? Hopefully it is useful to get people to switch away from Outlook, but its the lack of Exchange support that matters to most people, Hopefully that gets added soon!
good work mozilla lightning team!
Slashdot discussed Google Calendar over a year ago - wonder what is the holdup for them ...
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
What ever happened to Mozilla Sunbird? That was a calendar project too.
Corporate functionality? I'll be quite a few IT people would love to see a viable open source E-mail/corporate calender program (though MSO is so entrenched in many systems it would be damn near impossible to uproot it now...). This could be a big plus for newer businesses.
It will be really good, if it can sync with existing Outlook calender invite.
.ics formats.
Ex - You get a calender invite from outlook - your mozilla calender gets updated.
Similarly when you send a calender invite, it should be able to sync with others outlook calender in the same way. (i.e. calender invite from lighting setting up schedule in outlook calenders)
Since I am among the very people who use thunderbird in the office, and it is very *very* difficult since everybody else sends meeting requests in
While I'm not a fan of Microsoft Exchange, there's no denying that it works. With that said, I require its use at work, yet I spend most of my days using my linux machine. And that Exchange web interface is just godawful.
So I am wondering: What exchange compatible applications are Slashdotters using in linux?
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?
Well, Finchsync is a program that allows you to sync your contacts with Thunderbird, and apparently your appointments with Sunbird (though that was broken last time I tried it).
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.
Please be aware, that the use of nightly developer builds has some risks associated with it. Don't use them with production data.
* There are KNOWN DATALOSS BUGS in the calendaring code.
o Don't trust these builds with important calendaring or mail data
o Always make backups (one possible strategy for Calendaring data backups is described at Calendar:WebDAV testing harness)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Group sharing of contacts, resources, etc?
Scheduling with multiple complex calendars? Meeting invitations and e-mail reminders seemlessly included (and able to be sent from one outlook client to another)?
A lot of that is based on the fact that you're using outlook as an exchange client.
I definitely believe that Exchange is a steaming pile. It crashes frequently and has severe problems when the data in it exceeds a certain size for no good reason. Occasionally it corrupts itself.
It takes an expert in Exchange to administer despite the fact that the tasks that it is designed to handle are relatively simple concepts. (In contrast, SQL Server, which does something far more complicated to understand is actually easier to administer, IMHO, because it mostly works right).
However, at a lot of places we're all stuck with it, and with Outlook, until we've got a complete scheduling and e-mail solution that has features that are close.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Seriously. Because MS merged thier calendar stuff with thier email stuff and now people expect them to be joined at the hip. Sad but simple.
The next step is that Thunderbird+Lightning will be integrated into Firefox -- and then we'll finally have the Mozilla-based internet suite we've all been waiting for!
I personally do not need a calendar, and I would stall any thunderbird upgrade if it ever contains one.
Sleek, fast and trustworthy are a few keywords I put on the current thunderbird, and which is why I use it.
If they have to do it, make it optional as a plugin or extension, as with every other major non-mail related feature.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I've seen it mentioned in this thread already, but I want to add my own emphasis.
At least for corporations, people are tied to the clock/calendar. You can't disrupt the old tool until you can work with the old tool. Or, at the very least, be able to send meeting requests and import old calendar information into your new tool.
It is the small things like the Calendar and PowerPoint and file formats which let expensive software cling to a corporation like a bad fungus.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Hum... that would be a bit full circle...
I always thought T-Bird and F-Fox where supposed to be stand alone products.
The intigration between the two is actual pretty good as it is... in fact I would say that having one product that does it all may not always be a good thing I don't always want T-Bird to grab my mail just because I want to surf the web for instance.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Does anyone know if there are any contrib builds for Solaris 8 as there are for Thunderbird and Firefox?
Alternately, does anyone know if there are any Java based alternatives to Lightning? The default CDE calendar that's installed at work is ancient.
...this functionality into the larger desktop OS, with interoperability with major software suites, now that is the trick! See, this software would enable people on all platforms to collaborate, and that will be a killer app that would put Outlook, a crappy program, out of the picture.
I hear they plan to tie them all together into one project that does everything called "e-max".
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You do realise they all share the same codebases, don't you? And integration isn't something that is neccesarily a good thing. *cough*IE*cough*
Goten Xiao
I'd like to see schedule templates for helping me organize my busy life. I suggest the following pre-made ones for typical Firefox users:
The Leveller
7:45AM-8:50AM - Worlds of Warcraft
8:50AM-8:53AM - Ninja fast shower, gotta get to work!
8:53AM-9:05AM - Drive to work, clock in late
9:05AM-11:30AM - Read and post to WoW forums from work computer
11:30AM-12:30PM - Lunch! Just enough time to get home and mob, try to get Enchanted Axe of Althar or something.
12:30PM-5:30PM - Do enough work to keep that ass boss off your back, sell some WoW gold on eBay.
5:30PM-6:00PM - Drive home, resolve to buy some groceries and make a real dinner
6:00PM-6:10PM - Realize that Jack in the Box is faster, just get something there.
6:10PM-1:00AM - Worlds of Warcraft
1:00AM-7:45AM - Fitful sleep, plagued by dreams where nobody can read your chat messages in game.
The GPLion
9:30AM - Wake up, play some TuxRacer.
9:32AM - Check for updates to KDE, hit slashdot.
9:50AM - Finish writing screed defending Stalman while untarring a new nightly build in the background.
9:55AM - Start a new kernel compiling, then head off to CS class.
10:00AM - Listen to stupid Microsoft-loving professor tell me about stuff I'll never need. What do I care about 'big-endian' crap, this is COMPUTER SCIENCE, not freakin' Gulliver's Travels.
11:15AM - Get out of class, eat the macaroni & cheese I brought in tupperware.
12:00PM-2:45PM - Various classes about stuff I'll never use. Why do I need an english class? I _SPEAK_ english!
3:00PM - 4:00PM - Spent telling the TA who runs the computer lab why their PSP is inferior to my Samsung phone that runs linux, demo java TuxRacer.
4:00PM-6:00PM - Kernel has finished compiling at home, spend time trying to get computer working again.
6:15PM - Post comment to blog about how easy it was to get the new kernel going, and how you don't understand the problems other people are having.
7:00PM-10:00PM - Xena marathon! Watch on my MythTV setup. With this transparent weather overlay over the screen, I can totally tell what the weather is like outside, even if the audio is out of sync, it's STILL better than a goddamned tivo.
10:00PM-11:00PM - Porn.
The Hipster
7:00AM - Wake up with gentle alarm clock
7:15AM - Bagel and LOX down at the coffee house.
8:00AM - Bicycle to work while listening to all my podcasts on my Apple iPod(tm)
9:00AM - Start work, be sure to check all my RSS feeds.
12:00PM - Lunch. Did someone say sushi?
1:00PM - Back to work, adjust my square DKNY glasses and buckle down for at least an hour of email, then back to websites.
2:00PM - Boba/Bubble tea break!
5:00PM - Outta work, begin bicycling home.
6:30PM - Get home.
7:00PM - Dinner time, zagats sez to try that place on 14th.
9:00PM - Start watching all my Tivo'd shows, all PBS of course. I don't keep the idiot box for anything but PBS. Oh, and maybe Lost, and the Simpsons, but don't tell.
Even though us geeks tend to see little value in having a calendar bolted to an email program, there are lots of people out there who just can't seem to live without it. So this is a good first step.
But don't go looking for the one big server app that's going to be the "Exchange Killer" that goes with it. That's not how the open source world is answering that challenge. Exchange will not be a Goliath felled by David, it will be more like a Gulliver restrained by multiple Lilliputians. This is because programs like Lightning aren't being written to work with a single server -- they're using Webcal (iCalendar publish/subscribe over HTTP, made popular by Apple of course) and can talk to groupware servers like Citadel and OpenGroupware today. Further on down the line, connectors will become available for the emerging standard GroupDAV protocol. For more complex server-side logic, eventually CalDAV will come out of draft as well.
It's going to be a great world. Finally, after all these years of delay, group calendaring and scheduling will be as open, interoperable, and non-dominated-by-one-player as email is today.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
F'n finally? I get the outlook itch when I want some calendering done, and anweb browser extension or stand alone app just isnt cutting it. I need it intergrated into my email client when I'm actually, you know, emailing people about dates and events.
This is an old, old problem with UNIX. In the beginning, there were pipes, which are unidirectional. There were signals, which were badly botched in early UNIX, resulting in several redesigns, all different, with the end result that nobody could trust signals. Then came sockets, which were bidirectional but oriented towards talking to services on remote machines, not interprocess peer to peer communication locally. There's still no standard, always-there way for one program in the UNIX world to call another and get an answer back. There are about five CORBA implementations, there's OpenRPC, there's Java RMI, and there are a few other schemes not used much. But mostly, there's not much talking back and forth, other than at the file and pipe level or to a remote server.
I often wonder how UNIX history might have been different if a facility for this had been there from the early days. In UNIX, one program can invoke another, passing a set of command line arguments and environment variables. But all that comes back is a return code. How different it might have been if you got back output arguments. Then programs could have called other programs as subroutines.
Or if UNIX/Linux had had good interprocess communication from the early days.
That doesn't happen in Seamonkey too. If they figure out a good way that all Mozilla application share the same Gecko runtime, I'd even switch over. But apparantly they don't which means for each open Mozilla application you have an additional 20MB copy of the runtime in memory.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
great but how do i get out of GroupWise??? i have to use Groupwise at work, which i kind of like. but i would love to be able to use sunbird/lightning (with whatever) as the merge point for my family calendar needs and my work needs.
no sig today, come back tomorrow
When I have to rank Microsoft's products, I usually put SQL Server on third, right behind the natural keyboards and optical mice.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
What do I gain (or lose) using the extension instead of the Sunbird client?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The old way of calendaring is to have calendar on your PC/laptop that you then "sync" with your PDA. Nice, but it is possible to do much better.
Any real calendar app must store your data on the web, allow you to share events with selected other's calendars, and provide multiple easy ways of hooking up (adding events, seeing, and being notified) by the calendar.
So far, 30boxes and some others have come close to that.
I can share share my calendar with my wife so that we can add stuff to each other's calendars as needed. There are bookmarklets that allow me to easily add an event without actually navigating to the calendar, I get an rss feed for my public events, tagging capabilities, and sms notification of events if I want. It's pretty much near ideal.
So if mozilla wants to be a player in this department, they had better be ready to provide a lot a features and hit the ground running to compete with other calendar providers and, soon, Google Calendar.
"To protect your computer, Firefox prevented this site (www.mozilla.org) from installing software on your computer."
When trying to download Lightning... [Sigh]
Seriously. Because MS merged thier calendar stuff with thier email stuff and now people expect them to be joined at the hip. Sad but simple.
Not so sad and not so simple. Email and calendar functions have been integrated into "groupware" type apps since the mainframe days. It provided a single place to go to since those functions are typically related in most businesses. It may not make sense for ones personal use, but it makes complete sense from a business standpoint. I don't need to have six different apps open all the time for various functions.
> Thunderbird that will eventually (once it becomes more mature and stable) be built into Thunderbird.
God I hope not. The whole point of splitting out Thunderbird and Firefox from the Uber Mozilla Suite was to keep each part simple, non bloated, and good at what they do on their own. Thunderbird is an email client, not a scheduling client. If people want to download an extension for scheduling, fine. But don't lather up Thunderbird with something that it probably doesn't need for most poeple.
Along the same lines, Firefox doesn't need to be a scheduling client either.
It may be confusing but there are some differences between calendar and Sunbird. As explained here,
Calendar is the calendar extension for Mozilla products such as Mozilla Firefox,Mozilla Thunderbird, Seamonkey and the Mozilla Application Suite.
Sunbird is the standalone form of the calendar extension, which means that it doesn't need one of the above mentioned applications to run. Sunbird and Calendar use the same base code so their functionality is virtually the same and they share the same bugs and bug fixes. Some features currently depend on the underlying product:
Open URL works only on Mozilla Firefox., Seamonkey and the Mozilla Application Suite.
Email alarm works only in Mozilla Thunderbird, Seamonkey and the Mozilla Application Suite.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I agree. Thunderbird in its current form is an Outlook Express alternative. I couldn't care less about calendering as I never use it in Outlook anyway.
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
I find that syncing iCal.app to my Sony K750i works much better than my previous Nokia Communicator ever did. I then publish the Calendar on a private webDAV share so my other machines' grab it and show in Kontact. Who uses Outlook other than out of desperation? between dotProject, Intellisys http://www.webintellisys.com/ and iCal even my boss can see what I've been up to.
T
-- NSY - SY OOT - Doric signs on local shop doors.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
too late. I mean really, the calender in Mozilla sucked since it came out with Netscape Communicator 3.0 or so. There are other programs that fill the niche (Kalendar, evolution), but they are not perfect.
Having a good calendar application in Mozilla would certainly be nice. But at this glacial speed of development, I don't see it going mainstream any time soon.
Both IBM (PROFS) and UNISYS (OfisLink) had mainframe e-mail systems which combined both mail and meeting/calendar functionality a number of years before MS did it.
It's a functional expectation of old-school corporate e-mail, not an MS "innovation"...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
rephrase, "MS Made-it-popular/got-people-used-to-it at levels-other-than-big-business"
It's funny, in my Operating Systems class they praise UNIX's multiple IPC methods, and we were assigned a project where we had to do a whole bunch (sockets, command line args, shared memory, and pipes). We don't learn anything about Windows coding, but they always presented it to us as though Windows IPC methods were inferior. It's interesting to hear it from someone who appears to have done both.
I've been using the Mozilla Calendar extension for Thunderbird for a couple of months, and while I like the tighter integration between Lightening and Thunderbird, it doesn't work as well for me as the old Calendar extension. A few of my issues:
-- Tasks appear on every day between the start and due date. I don't need to see the same task every day. If my taxes are due on the April 15th, I just want to see that I need to get them done before then. (Actually, this is the main reason I removed Lightening and went back to the Calendar extension. I just couldn't see my actual events with the same Tasks repeated on every day of the month).
-- It doesn't seem to handle remote calendars as well. I am currently running a Web DAV server to synch my calendars between my Mac at home and Thunderbird at work, so all of my calendars are remote. Lightening had issues with several events that have never been a problem in either iCal or the Calendar extension. This caused those calendars to mount read-only until I went and changed it. However, this happened every time I launched Thunderbird and it came across the same problem. A quick look at the error message implies that it has to do with either start or due dates on some tasks, but I haven't had a problem with any other calendar programs reading them, so I wouldn't expect Lightening to either.
-- Finally, just a bunch of small visual things. There's no multi-week view, no indication of all day events other than the lack of a start time, events with short names don't span the whole cell (which causes it to look really crappy if you have multiple events with different lenght titles on the same day), etc.
It looks like a good start, and I hope that these few bugs get taken care of because I would love to have the calendar integrated into Thunderbird instead of having to launch it separately, but for me it doesn't work as well as the Mozilla Calendar extension that I was already using.
Why not implement this as some sort of extension, similar to extensions in firefox? That way, people who want an integrated calendar/email app can have one, and those (like me) who just want an application that does email only can still use Thunderbird? How many people really use all the calendar stuff, anyway?
That's the real problem. In the Windows world, you're certain to have COM and its friends available to every application. It's not perfect, but it's universal. The UNIX/Linux world has no comparably pervasive intercommunication mechanism. And most of the ones it does have assume a client/server system; they're not a good way for your calendar to talk to your e-mail program, which is more peer to peer.
www.digg.com
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---
Looks to me like they're doing a-okay. Stop feeding trolls, you're no better with your weak attacks.
If performance and memory usage are among your biggest concerns, maybe Wyrd would be a better fit. It's built on top of Remind, a Unix console calendar with powerful scripting capabilities.
Disclaimer: Yes, I wrote Wyrd, and am therefore thoroughly convinced of it's awesomeness. But in all seriousness, it's extremely fast and runs in under 2MB. Textmode applications have their advantages.
OK. I'll stop feeding him, if you stop defending him. We'll call it a "win-win".
VOTE!
I beg to differ. Unix offers many IPC methods, and RPC (in whatever incarnation) is widely acknowledged as the least desirable of them, in the Unix tradition. BSD sockets are probably the most useful and flexible. Sure, using sockets forces you to come up with some text-based protocol to "marshall/unmarshall" the data you pass among your software components. But this is good, since it forces you to use a loosely coupled architecture.
For people who have a lot of meetings and phone calls, there's a real need to have addresses and phone numbers in one place and be able to access this info from a lot of different applications -- email, calendar, billing applications and so forth. Appending a calendar to an email program, or cramming the two things together, is one (not really so very good) way to accomplish part of this integration.
Better Mozilla, or someone (Google? They seem smart.) addressed the problem from a new, and smarter, angle. Small business people I've talked to would pay serious money to have an accessible, extensible group, web accessible contact management application.
...the joke was that Mozilla itself is a full Internet suite, and Firefox was their answer to users' complaints that it was heavily-bloated when they would primarily use it for one or two things.
--- What
You're wrong on all accounts. I'm Canadian, and am not demanding the software, I'm providing feedback to the Slashgeek community about what I think makes the best applications in this day and any age. People have always wanted blazing fast apps. We'd still play C-64 games if it didn't take a minute to load some of them. A great app doesn't mean it can do everything under the sun. Opening in under 2 seconds is a cooler feature than a grammar checker for something like a spreadsheet or database.
Oh You POS
Just a quick warning: there are still a lot of outstanding bugs in the codebase, don't trust 0.1 software with any important data.
I've been bitten twice by Sunbird (hard) and have resigned to waiting till a non-beta release. I can't wait to see this project reach completion, but unless you can deal with randomly losing chunks of your important schedule, or the joy of missing meetings because they've magically changed times in your calendar, might be worth giving it a bit more time.
Why not put them all together and have one kick butt application?
Wait, we did have that in mozilla before the "core team" cut them all apart to simplify everything.
Now they start coming back together.
Whou would have thought that people might want to have a browser, calendar, and email client integrated? Brilliant!
Seamonkey? What kind of name is that? Mozilla was bad enough, at least you could stick with the same stupid name.
For what it's worth (probably not much!), there is already an extension to integrate the calendar into Firefox. It's based on the 0.2 codebase, but that's not necessarily a bad thing at the moment. I've been running Sunbird 0.2 for months now with only a few minor problems. The various releases and nightlies I've tried of the new codebase have all either had bad crashing problems or data loss issues. I'm really looking forward to these getting resolved; there are some great new features in the Sunbird 0.3 releases!
Steven N. Severinghaus
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Then why did they cut firefox out of mozilla?
Browsing and email are the killer app for the internet.
Calendaring solutions / meeting scheduling plus newsgroups are the killer app for business.
Why not have a single application?
Bloat oh no! We can't expect people to download a 15 MB executable! I like having a email notification in my browser. I like having links and copy past handled effectively.
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.
But, you can't conspire with yourself! See, e.g., COPPERWELD CORP. v. INDEPENDENCE TUBE CORP., 467 U.S. 752 (1984) ("We hold that Copperweld and its wholly owned subsidiary Regal are incapable of conspiring with each other for purposes of 1 of the Sherman Act.") http://www.justia.us/us/467/752/case.html
Lightning looks real promising. Let's just hope they don't do the same mistake as 90% of other calendar / todolist / addressbook projects do. We need to be able to synchronize our mobile phones, pda's and other equipment with it!!! Why do I still use Outlook? Because it's fast and stable? Hell no! I use it because it syncs my phone :/
In my opinion, syncing should almost be priority 1 in these applications.
*looking forward to deleting MS Outlook*
Speak for yourself. We've been running Exchange 2003 for two years now, and the only downtime we've had for non-patching needs was when we had a hard disk failure on one of the boxes. 9 Exchange servers distributed over Australia.
I get maybe 1-2 Exchange-related calls a week from 3500 users, most of which are stupid things like "I'm in cache mode and delayed send doesn't work!". I wish it *did* bloody work, but there's MS for you (apparently the *majority* of people don't use the functionality, thus no need for them to make it work in cache mode).