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.

The System Tray

[Henry V .009]

Like Thunderbird, Sunbird is hampered by the fact that it will not minimize to the system tray in Windows XP. I don't want to leave it on all the time because it takes up a lot of space on the task bar. And what use is a calendar program that isn't on all the time?

There are third party fixes to this, and for all I know extensions that do the same thing, but it would be really nice to have system tray minimization as default behavior.

Re:The System Tray

[Refrozen]

Yeah, that is a problem, but Thunderbird has a lot of other problems as far as I've seen (making me choose Refrozen [refrozen.com]-WebMail as my client of choice, no you can't use it, for my personal use only :-))

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.

Re:whine whine

[Matt Perry]

You know, there's KOrganizer

You assume we all run some form of Unix.

I've not been waiting

[confused philosopher]

I've been using this program, for months now. It's rather clunky though, and crashes sometimes in my Windows XP.

Re:Looks like iCal...

[Richard_at_work]

Theres always a big bruhaha whenever MS comes out with a product or feature not 100% origional and unique. Why ignore it when OSS does it (and blantantly so)?

Palm?

[rscrawford]

I know that the major thing keeping my wife tied to Outlook on Windows is that her Palm won't sync with Thunderbird or Sunbird.

Re:Waiting, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why did so many people say "Of course Firefox is buggy, it isn't at 1.0 yet." Are you saying Firefox is commercial software?

Uh... I'm not actually endorsing his view, but it seems obvious that he meant that at 0.2 it would be as buggy as a 1.0 proprietary release and, presumably, that by 1.0 it would be less buggy than a 1.0 proprietary release. I don't see any way to read his post to mean that all bugs would be resolved before (or at or after) 1.0

Maybe you could explain your point better?

Re:Waiting, eh?

[symbolic]

I guess porting it to XUL is an interesting change, but I still see a very narrow mindset with respect to what an "event" is. Not all "events" have a start time and a stop time. With some, you just want to note the date and time they occurred (past tense), and are completely uninterested in anything related to duration. I hope that someone will take an innovative step in the design of this (or other OS calendaring software) that will allow users to define events however they want.

All this doesn't really matter

[esconsult1]

I'm a big Linux booster out here. A year ago, I convinced the "powers that be" to convert our shop to Linux desktops. They did, and we have some 40 desktops with about 10 (and shrinking) windows clients now.

Sure, we have Firefox and Openoffice and Evolution. But here's the kicker, there is no Exchange alternative (Opengroupware ain't there yet) that can work with Evolution, or for that matter no non-browser based collab software that works with Gnome (and lets be brutally, this is where the corp Linux desktop is headed).

Now the office really needs the functionality of Exchange as we live and die by meetings and tasks. I slapped myself hard in the head yesterday when I recommended that we install Exchange as a replacement for that really sweet Qmail/Vpopmail/IMAP setup that I installed two years ago. But I had no choice!!!

So every mention of another standalone calendar client with everyone still forgetting about that missing server-side link just drives me crazy! Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the effort, and the calendar client looks nice, but designing a front end without thought for collabaration on the ass end is a bit short sighted.

This is the piece of the puzzle that is preventing shops like mine from completely moving from the dark side. Microsoft knows this and charges through the nose for Exchange CAL and server licenses.

I can live without another story about Yet Another Standalone Calendar.