Mozilla Sunbird's First Official Release

jcraveiro writes "MozillaZine announced yesterday that Sunbird, Mozilla's standalone cross-platform calendar project, has reached its first official relase: version 0.2, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X." This is good news for all of us waiting for decent free calendaring software.

Re:Coming Soon: Mozilla, The OS

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Mozilla games: http://games.mozdev.org/

Mozilla can't be integrated with OOo, because of licensing issues, and the enormous bloat it would create, given the two different codebases.

In any case, a web-utilities suite and an office suite aren't enough to constitute a web browser. They would be enough for a simplistic out-of-the-box experience though.

Re:The System Tray

[hey!]

Maybe I'm missing your point, but I believe what you do is double click on the message in your drafts folder to open it, then click the send button that is the leftmost item on the toolbar.

Nice

[tsa]

I've used Sunbird for Linux for a while now and I must say it's fairly good. There are a lot of bugs of course but it's usable and I like it. But that's also because I didn't try anything else. Because I have a Mac, Xp, and Linux I love all Mozilla stuff because it runs on all those platforms almost exactly the same.

Re:Is it integrated with Thunderbird yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sunbird is a stand-alone version of Mozilla Calendar (which is linked in the sidebar on the Sunbird page). Mozilla Calendar is an extension that you can install into Mozilla, Firefox, or Thunderbird. In other words: Sunbird is not going to be integrated into Thunderbird, as the project it's based on already is.

Re:The System Tray

[Zugok]

Try Suntray [dart.net.au] . It's not part of the Sunbird package but minimises it into the tray nicely and I am very happy with it.

Re:The System Tray

[don'tyellatme]

wow. that's not a problem with any mozilla software. that's what extensions are for. http://minimizetotray.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

Re:Nice

[Epistax]

I'd really like to use it but as a linux user who isn't an expert, I can't install this software. The readme mentions two different ways to install Sunbird, of course both mention scripts which don't actually exist (mozilla-installer and mozilla). All I'm left with is a bunch of .so's and executables.

I know this isn't the place to ask for tech support so I'm not asking for any. I'm just saying they didn't make it obvious to me how to install Sunbird.

PalmOS sync

[aussie_a]

This is the dream app for me as a college student (I hate using PalmOS's default calender app). But whilever it doesn't install and syn on PalmOS (Tungsten E), it's useless to me as well.

Re:Nice

[tsa]

I haven't tried version 0.2 yet but the earlier versions you could just unpack and then run the executable. Maybe you can try that.

Re:Does it work with Exchange?

[ajaf]

1- Evolution + plugin for exchange.
2- Kmail (or Kontacto) + plugin for exchange.
3- Microsoft Exchange web access.

The days of "I stay with windows becouse of outlook+exchange are over"
Come on, you don't need Windows ;)

Re:Looks like iCal...

[NutscrapeSucks]

Apple themselves copied the idea from MS IE for Mac [creativepro.com], which appeared long before OS X.

Re:Less than stable on Mac OS X

[GerbilSoft]

You're supposed to copy the Sunbird executable out of the disk image first. This infinite restart loop is a known bug IF you run it from the disk image.

Palm Desktop 4.1.4 doesn't "require" a Palm device

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a couple people who continue using their Palm Desktop long after their handheld device died. And another person that uses his Palm device just for backups. They all love the Palm Desktop which is downloadable.

ps

I hope Palm doesn't screw it up by changing it. Like they screwed up PDAs by making them too large. The Palm V and Vx were perfect in terms of size and I'd buy one today for $400+ if it could do email in that form-factor. Until then, I'm sticking with my Palm Vx because if the PDA is too big, I won't be carrying it around.

Re:PocketPC sync

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets hope the Sunbird team are looking into SyncML:
http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/af filiates/ syncml/syncmlindex.html

There is an open source implementation here:
http://www.sync4j.org

It's actually pretty nice, I'm using it for syncing my Outlook and my Qtek PDA. Newer phones phones from Nokia and SE support SyncML, but I havent managed to get this working yet.

Actually, Microsoft's

[Trillan]

No, it was not in the Mozilla suite (aka Seamonkey). In fact, it still isn't. It was first seen in Internet Explorer on Macintosh, then (with a lot of refinement) in Mac OS X 10.0, then copied almost pixel by pixel (with an improvement in behaviour) to Firefox.

Is it a big deal? No. But at least don't refute its history.

Internet Explorer for Mac Release Dates [wikipedia.org] (IE 5 was March 2000)
Mac OS X 10.0 Review, Page 10 [arstechnica.com] "The real fun starts when you select "Customize Toolbar..." from the "View" menu (or shift-click the toolbar widget in the window title bar). The contents of the window are replaced by a palette of toolbar widgets shamelessly reminiscent of Internet Explorer's toolbar customization feature."
Independent Mac OS X 10.1 Release Date [arstechnica.com] Mac OS X was released on March 24th, 2001, with a suggested retail price of $129 and a version number of 10.0.
First Customize Toolbar In Any Mozilla Product [mozilla.org] A few of the features new to this release include: Customizable toolbar.
Phoenix 0.1 Release Date [mozillazine.org] (September 23rd, 2002; over a year later)

Re:Nice

[gentlemoose]

sudo mv ./(sunbird folder) /usr/local/
sudo ln -s /usr/local/(sunbird folder)/(sunbird executable) /usr/local/bin/sunbird

Is that seriously a show-stopper?

[JavaRob]

You have a point; any "always open" app like email/calendar should not take up space on the task bar. Personally I have lots of apps like this (that I want to leave open all day w/o them taking up taskbar space). Is that seriously a show-stopper for people, though?

My current solution is PowerMenu [veridicus.com]; it's tiny, freeware, and gives you a "minimize to tray" option for all windows. I also use it to reorganize things on my taskbar (e.g., comparing old output with new, I can have the older document on the left... it just works better in my mind).

Tips: use the commandline options to disable menu extras you don't want. Here are my options:
-hideself on -disable priority -disable transparency -disable alwaysontop

Open source groupware standards

[IGnatius T Foobar]

The problem we've been failing to solve for way too long is that there's no standard access protocol for open source groupware clients to talk to open source groupware servers. Fortunately, this is about to change.

GroupDAV [groupdav.org] is a subset of DAV designed to handle this task. The draft version of the spec is available already, and unlike most new protocols, its primary goal is to be simple enough for widespread implementation. GroupDAV uses the vCalendar/iCalendar and vCard standard data formats, and a simple HTTP-based transport with some DAV-like methods to allow searching and updating.

GroupDAV is being implemented by (at least) the following projects:

• Citadel [citadel.org] (open source groupware server)
• OpenGroupware (another server)
• Kontact (and KOrganizer, et al) (the KDE groupware client)
• Evolution (client)
• There is a Sunbird implementation rumored to be in its beginning stages as well.

It's probably only a matter of time before some third party ties Outlook into GroupDAV as well.

I've been advocating the idea of open source groupware since 1998. Fortunately, some concensus is finally starting to form about how everything is going to interoperate. Exchange is one of the most heinous Microsoft products out there and it's about time we displaced it.

Re:The System Tray

[chill]

With Thunderbird, if you save a letter to send later, you have no way (that I can find) to send it, you have to restart the program for it to send it self, (in other words, there is no send button, just a recieve button)... Maybe I am wrong, or have the concept mixed up, but, that's how I see it.

File Menu --> Send Unsent Messages

Re:Coming Soon: Mozilla, The OS

[Jesus 2.0]

A browser, email client, calender, and office suite do not an operating system make.

That minor point aside, a main problem with the whole XUL concept, in terms of extensibility, is the lack of good namespacing (or similar) capabilities in Javascript. If your extension uses a function called "getData", and mine uses a variable called "getData", guess what, there are problems. And nothing is going to tell you "hey, there's a conflict" - the underlying engine will happily call one of them. Maybe not the one you wanted. Global variables further complicate the issue.

Of course, today, this kind of problem is merely one that makes plugin developers scratch their heads and waste a lot of time, until finally they realize "Oh, goddamn, this programming environment is idiotic", and fix the immediate problem.

But if XUL has grand schemes on everything in the entire computer world, this issue has to be addressed.

Another issue is that the base applications don't always give names to widgets that you may want to modify. As far as I know, there is thereafter no way to safely extend those in a plugin - maybe its parent is named "blah", and you can say "modify blah's fourth widget child", but what if another plugin programmer inserted a widget before blah's (initial) fourth, thus making the one that you want to modify the fifth? Then you're modifying some random widget that you didn't intend to, with unpredictable and unintended consequences.

If you think C/C++ buffer overflows are bad, wait until XUL takes over the world. You'll have malware that hijacks function calls, malware that intentionally causes popular plugins to modify things that they weren't intended to modify, and so forth.

Here's an often overlooked util

[Asphixiat]

http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php

this is what we are currently using. I is an awesome groupware calendar. exports in vcal/ical and allows you to view other users calendars overlayed with yours.

Full administration through the web interface (JS), all you need is apache and php - all our users love it. This is the perfect small business opensource calendar. A few small things I'd like, but hey - I can hack it to do what I want too :)

Re:The System Tray

[jsight]

There are several alternatives:
All Tray [sourceforge.net]

KDocker (not kdes specific either) [sourceforge.net]