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Mozilla Calls on User Community Today for Testing
lisah writes "As Mozilla prepares to release updates for its calendar applications Sunbird and Lightning, project developers are calling on the user community to participate in the final stages of testing. The Mozilla Calendar Team has proclaimed today as Test Case Writing Day and users worldwide are encouraged to participate. Mozilla developer Clint Talbert tells NewsForge that today's event is a pre-cursor to the Calendar Test Day Mozilla will hold later this month prior to the final release of version 0.3."
I like the idea of having the users contribute like this. Something that I really like about Mozilla is the fact that its users are given a big voice. Not all OSS asks for so much input from non-coding users. I always look forward to new releases, too, as the organization seems to wait to release instead of rushing crap.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
My aunt Tilly is a subscriber, got the news early, and went into hiding before I could start on my test case :(
I know it's only alpha so I shouldn't complain, but every time they release a new version, I have to enter all my dates again because they've changed the storage format again. I don't suppose this time will be any diferent. I've got a lot of history that I don't want to lose. I think I'll stick with v2 until they relese 1.0.
Lightning supports CalDAV for sharing calendar information. Apple announced yesterday that Leopard iCal Server and the iCal application will both talk CalDAV, they released the server at http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/collaboration. Bedework is making a lot of progress as an institutional calendar server.
Oracle has a CalDAV stack. IBM has some stuff in the works as well.
It looks like exchange will have a fight on its hands very soon.
I've been helping on a CalDAV plugin for Outlook called Open Connector, which allows Outlook to take to CalDAV servers like Apple's and Bedework. We always need help, if you have a lot of experience developing COM apps in C++, come help out.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Is Mozilla going to incorporate automated testing into the project?
Y
Who better to test something then those who will use it. Now of course there are betas and automatic reporting that also help... but there is nothing like the developers asking their users for feedback in a very humble way like this.
It's their way of saying, our software is probably full of holes but with your help we can make it better.
MS tried that with XP and their error reporting feature. From what I understand, their success was amazing with that tool... however I never felt someone say that they felt appreciated for submiting their error reports.
Gotta love companies who realize that it's the users not the software that make their product great. Give users what they want, make them feel like they are appreciated, and most of all respect them; keys to any truely great software (or any other product for that matter). Now if only we could get the RIAA and the rest of the media companies bent on making fair use mean fairly usable to understand what customers want.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
...to test Firefox for massive memory leaks and general instability on Linux?
Use and more specificly write _valid_ RFC 2445 compliant (aka iCal) files. Last I checked, Sunbird kinda made up it's own almost-close format, making it's own little walled garden.
.3 in favor of their own custom format someone decided was cooler? Some of us actually use and crosslink the files from our calendar program, phpicalendar, email etc, and this was a rather fatal mistake by the Mozillians that made it useless.
And didn't they ditch iCal support in
Good thing every other mail/calendaring program on the planet now supports the format, correctly usually, and stores things in it. I'm afraid in this case the open source solution is light years behind Apple (no surprise) and even Microsoft (they arent even trying).
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
1. Use Mozilla
2. Write Test Cases
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
I finally know what the ??? is!!!
Sounds like a job for a business analyst, IMO.
IMHO the ship has passed and everyone who was interested in a calendaring solution from Mozilla moved on to something else years ago because they got tired of waiting. The project has just sat for too long without gaining any traction. Vista's calendar will end up taking over for Windows users and I don't see many Ical users jumping ship. Of course *nix users have several of these programs to choose from. Business users will continue to stick with Outlook. I've been a Moz booster for many years now but I simply just can't get excited about this project.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I know I don't want my users doing that for my code.
Besides, whatever happened to "Test First"?
Enjoy, Randy.
SHIP IT!
Last time I tried a Sunbird supposedly beta release, it was so buggy that is just wasn't useable (at all). It would lose data, scramble it around, crash randomly, use 100% of my processor, etc. I was permanently scared away from Sunbird if that's what they called a beta. I would've loved to use Sunbird, but that was a long time ago, and we've since moved onto Outlook because we 1. were tired of waiting and 2. didn't have anything remotely useable in the meantime.
I'm sure you're aware that neither of these issues are anything that the Firefox team can do anything about. You should be addressing your complaints and bug reports to the developers of the plugins that implement those functions. That'd be Adobe, right?
Pirate Party UK
I would like to get involved with Mozilla/Firefox and in a couple of cases have earnestly tried, checking out the gigantic repository, and reading up on XPCOM and trying out samples, but the checkout/build procedure is just so teeth gnashingly horrendous, I eventually just run away screaming. Some goes for OpenOffice.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
as is google calendar. SYNC WITH PALM OR GET THE FUCK OUT it's pretty simple
(types about:plugins in Firefox)
Shockwave Flash 8.0 r22
Adobe Acrobat Plug-In Version 7.00 for Netscape
Works for me, sounds like your chair-to-keyboard interface is broken.
I'm sure you're aware that neither of these issues are anything that the Firefox team can do anything about. You should be addressing your complaints and bug reports to the developers of the plugins that implement those functions. That'd be Adobe, right?
Or he could be requesting native pdf support without adobe's plugin. via gs code or similar. I'd like to second that.
He also might try making Adobe open outside of Firefox for Pdf files. Also http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pdfspeedup.html check this app out.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Does it implement the email reminder? If so, PASSED!
IIRC, last time I tried to load my GooCal calendar into Sunbird, Sunbird went kinda' wonky. I believe it had something to do with all day events. That and/or the times shifted.
I think it may have been Google's different interpretation of the iCal spec, like failing to put an end date on the event, but was something that could easily be detected and corrected for on the input side.
It pretty much made me stick with just GooCal.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
nuff said. They are as bad as MSFT, out of touch with their customers.
about Firefox.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Of course. It's wonderful Firefox works like shit in one of the two major UNIX desktops. Say what you will about Windows, but there this has been a non-issue for years.
Sunbird/Lightning for Linux x86 have had a critical bug -- cannot click on 'recipients' field. Retested with last nights builds, bug still there. The product is basically useless with this bug.
Similarly, current Xulrunner 1.9 nightly builds run very slow -- need to revert to the version from Sept. 2005. Xulrunner is relevant because to help with Sunbird you need to know XUL. Learning XUL, you cannot even find a "Hello World" program to get started, instead the tutorials at xulplanet.com try to wow you with all the features in XUL (if you could _just_ get your first "Hello World" program working!). I had to work backwards from a "pacman" game (the only program I could find that actually had the three components JavaScript, CSS, and XUL working), to produce my own "Hello World" program. You can do some amazing things with XUL at that point. Mozdev actually has a program "Exch" in its "XUL hall of fame" that the author couldn't get the CSS working on due to their convoluted, poorly documented, and constantly changing "Chrome://", overlays, skins, etc.
The various Mozilla components share lots of code, and I see things like "Firefox and Thunderbird (and presumably Sunbird/Lightning) will run as Xulrunner applications once Xulrunner reaches 1.0" (1.9 ?> 1.0). Seems like that plan was abandoned, and the current xulrunner nightly build is barely running.
To summarize, it seems the entire Mozilla development process needs review to see why major components apparently have no simple test cases/documentation and the community is being asked to do a bug hunt on a non-working product.
Move on to Opera or IE7 on the PC, Safari 2+ on the MAC.
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I don't know why people want to read PDFs in the browser in the first place. My windows browser loads Foxit to display PDFs and on Linux the browser loads Evince (the Gnome document viewer). PDFs are hard enough to navigate without having to deal with the limitations of plugins.