Mozilla's Sunbird Reviewed 208
comforteagle writes "Mozilla Sunbird is the latest stand-alone application from the Mozilla foundation that follows in the footsteps of now revered browser Firefox and email client Thunderbird. OSDir reviews their first public release, version 0.2. Screenshots included."
FP (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla tries the unintegrated method. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla tries the unintegrated method. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone making software would be nuts not to try the competitors product. I mean, surely Audi engineers try BMW's to see what they have to compete against, right?
two things... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Open it up for extensions, the way firebird is. 2) until it can sync with mobile devices (palm, pocketpc.. etc), i won't be implementing it.
Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks identical to Outlook's Calendar, even menu option names etc.
OSS seems to be totally following the MS way, including very little innovation.
Re:Mozilla tries the unintegrated method. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Thanks for your time though.
Re:Wait.... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Sunbird is the new cross-platform calendar application from the Mozilla foundation"
There ain't no iCal on Win32 nor Linux.
And as far as mozilla ripping off netscape, I think you have it backwards.. netscape is built on top of mozilla.
Re:Wait.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Correction -- Version 0.2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Journalism 101
Re:Problems with remote calendars (Score:2, Insightful)
Serving is the key (Score:5, Insightful)
Palm Pilot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on! (Score:5, Insightful)
#2 Of course it looks like Outlook Calendar, until MS Sues and then it will look like something else.
#3 No Synch, yet, see #1.
#4 It is a basic calendar app, no frills, see #1.
#5 Some day, the Mozilla development teams, will find a way to Integrate Thunderbird, Firefox, and Sunbird into something more productive. Just not today.
In your summary... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla tries the unintegrated method. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly right!
In fact, that was one serious problem I noticed with Apple when I worked there. Nobody believed they had any competition, and nobody ran competitors products. Folks there really beleived, for example, that if you tried to plug a digital camera into a Windows XP machine you'd have to spend hours downloading drivers and dealing with BSOD.
It's SMART to know what the competition is doing. I'd be disappointed in Microsoft if they didn't keep abreast of the competitors.
Re:some integration would be nice (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Actually... (Score:1, Insightful)
In other words, a Mozilla bug likely ALREADY affects Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc, just like how Windows bug affects IE, OE, MS Office, etc. Except in Mozilla's case you need to patch each seperately.
Mozilla is "more than a browser, it's a development framework", remember? That means it has all the risks associated with shared code. In short, if you really want isolated applications, Mozilla is not for you.
Yeah, the article was stupid, BUT.... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the app isnt ready for prime time just yet, but I've played with it and I really dig it for what it is.
Like most of the mozilla family, Sunbird just sits there waiting to be told what to do. It's FAR from robust at this point, but for a single user that has trouble remembering family birthdays, its not a bad little application. It'll come up to speed eventually, and the fact that with a little toying around I managed to store the calendar inside my hosted website and can have the up-to-date calendar on whatever machine I use is fantastic.
For you guys bitching that it wont automatically synch with whatever youre using: for christ's sake, spend 40 minutes learning perl and you can munge that file into just about fomat you need.
I look forward to the day when Sunbird grows up and is no longer just another open source beta.
Re:two things... (Score:2, Insightful)
It will probably happen when all the extension code is ported from the branch to the trunk - currently, Sunbird needs to be built off the trunk of the mozilla.org CVS tree, but most of the extension manager stuff is in a CVS branch (from which Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird something-or-other is supposed to build from).
I assume the Firefox people will port the EM stuff back into the trunk once Firefox 1.0 is done (since Firefox will eventually go there as well to pick up the Mozilla 1.8 stuff).
That, and ths Sunbird version number ("0.2a") is bad - the "a" breaks the version comparison scheme ([0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\+? with chunks optional).
Assuming the EM gets fixed, it will have to be open for extensions - Sunbird, like Ffx / Tbird / Seamonkey / etc., is XUL based, and the underlying mechanism (overlays) is basically built into XUL.
Re:Mozilla tries the unintegrated method. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would expect the engineers to do this. I would expect the designers to do this. I would expect the marketing department to do this.
I would not expect the guy who runs the safety testing facility to do it.
Re:It does. (Score:3, Insightful)