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Mozilla Calls on User Community Today for Testing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the where's-my-door-prize dept.

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."

9 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Re-neter all your dates again, I suppose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Lots of Calendar news lately by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Lots of Calendar news lately by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 4, Informative

      By the way, iCal isn't an Apple format; although it was invented there, it's been submitted as a standard IIRC.

      I don't think so. iCal, ie. iCalendar is RFC 2445. Microsoft and Lotus employees are listed as principals on that one. That became a standard in '98.

      What Apple did, unfortunately, is choose the iCal name for their application. A name most people used to refer to the files conforming to RFC 2445 and others.

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      Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
    2. Re:Lots of Calendar news lately by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm guessing there is something different with caldav vs the old system of just throwing up ical files via webdav.

      Yes. The old system wasn't really a standard. Eg. How can the client figure out your free/busy time? Or how should the files be name? etc.

      CalDAV specifies storage, and also the reporting of the stored calendar data. So the calendar client can ask 'What events happen between th 10th and 14th?' or a query for appointments in the month of June, etc. without downloading an entire folder of *.ics files.

      The situation is much improved.

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      Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
  3. Not so interested by bogie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
    1. Re:Not so interested by SilentTristero · · Score: 4, Interesting

      > Business users will continue to stick with Outlook

      Don't be so sure. We're a small mostly-Windows shop (Win/Linux/Mac for developers, Windows for the admin/sales/mktg folks) and we have no M$ servers. Linux-based mail/dns/fileserver infrastructure. Everyone uses Tbird/Ffox, no IE. Outlook doesn't really play well into that kind of environment; so we REALLY need shareable calendars. Right now Chandler & Sunbird aren't far enough along for real business use (at least not a couple of months ago); even event notification was unreliable in Sunbird. iCal is OK but Mac-only. Vista for us is a far-off upgrade.

      So at least some of us are very interested in recent Chandler and Sunbird progress.

  4. I am skeptical... by rjstegbauer · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Something tells me that users should not be writing test cases.

    I know I don't want my users doing that for my code.

    Besides, whatever happened to "Test First"?

    Enjoy, Randy.

    1. Re:I am skeptical... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Something tells me that users should not be writing test cases.

      Yeah, you're right. Those users, they don't know how the application should be used.

  5. Re:Profit! by andrewman327 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think you are missing the whole point of F/OSS. The prize is buried on the website and is not the reason that people want to do this.

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