Along with the new Mozilla-Japan initiative and the release of Mozilla 1.8a3 (vote for it at GnomeFiles), the Mozilla team released Mozilla Sunbird 0.2a, a stand-alone calendaring application similar to iCal. These builds are the first to feature a new default theme, a new logo and the customizable toolbar functionality. Note that Sunbird is still an experimental technology preview that contain bugs.
Mozilla Releases Mozilla Sunbird 0.2a
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I’m glad Sunbird has been updated and continues improvement.
Minus the true groupware functionality, this represents Mozilla’s 3rd standalone application (calendar/tasks) to help replace Outlook’s functionality.
Thunderbird/Firefox/Sunbird will continue to help Win32 users.
Thanks team!
I have started using this calender application after I was impressed by ical on Mac. Though it is no where near it, it is good effort. If it improves(it still is 0.2a), I think it will be good companion to Firefox and Thunderbird!
Thanks to Mozilla Team
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/index.html
It has info re Windows and OSX builds.
and the evolution windows port?
and the evolution windows port?
it has nothing to do with the mozilla team.
Would be nice, though.
Someone has already re-posted Eugenia’s text on Slashdot, verbatim.
Yeah, me. I stole it from myself. (Gentu is my nickname
wow perhaps when we’ll get Office 12 or later this might get close to the usability of Office 9. Please stop comparing it to Outlook it’s extremely far away from it, the only people who say it is good is the ones who don’t know how to use Outlook!
It’s apples and oranges here. Sunbird is more like iCal which works great for me. If you can add some sort of collaboration feature to Sunbird then you can start making comparisons. Lookout is crash-happy and buggy, though, so let’s not allow Sunbird or,iCal for that matter, to get to that point.
Eugenia, I think you should change your posting style to read ‘rate it at GnomeFiles’ rather than ‘vote for it’.
When you say ‘vote for it’, it suggests than you are directing readers (who may not know the subject from a bar of soap) to register their preference for something, as opposed to others. I, personally, always have an adverse reaction to reading that, even though I now realise you would like me to rate it rather than vote for it.
Thanks
As a non-english person, “vote” is the same as “rate” for me. This is one of these cases where small, subtle, meanings on words can create misunderstandings.
Like the “I propose this or that…” I used to use in UK at my work. In the area I was living in, “propose” would only be used when proposing for marriage. You can imagine the laughs from the co-workers.
The new look is nice, but aside from that this app definitely needs a lot of polish and bugfixing.
I like it, though.
If it’s going to be like Firefox (as in looks – the alarm notification window looks kind of cheesy right now) this will be a winner.
EUgenia, I know how important connotations are for you in UI design – take it from me that for a native english speaker there is an important difference between ‘vote’ and ‘rate’.
To rate something is to make an estimate of its worth, while to vote for something is to state a preference for it, with regard to other candidates. Note that you can’t just ‘vote’ something, you must vote ‘for’ or ‘against’…
Thanks for responding.
@Eugenia
I am a french male, I’ve been working in the UK for a while and now in the US.
Let me tell you, I’ve been proposing for a long time
. I have been told to replace automaticaly by ‘offer or suggest’.
only those speaking one language complain!
note: I am still single :-p
It bothers me a lot that I had started writing a web based calandar and scheduling system along these lines ten years ago, but didn’t follow through because of various difficulties… Sigh, so much for my career as an entrepreneur… :p
Because I have switched to Mozilla Thunderbird for my mail, I was also interested in Mozilla Calendar. I tried it a few months ago, and to be honest, I was a bit disappointed. But I liked to feature to store the data on a webdav store. That opens the possibility for groupware functionality and web-based access to your calendar.
I still use Outlook for calendaring. It allows me many nice tricks, and I can store all kind of files as attachments to my appointments.
But I’ll install this new version because i’m still curious. And when I have some time available, I might consider helping – this project needs a boost and everyone who has just one evening a week available should do something.
They should include sunbird in some future release of mozilla.
I use both mozilla mail as well as mozilla navigator, and I prefere to have them in a single bundle instead of separate firefox, and thunderbird. I would really welcome some new modules to mozilla.
I haven’t been using iCal on my mac mainly as I didn’t want to get stuck using a single-platform product for data I may want to use on any of my machines.
Thanks, Mozilla.. You have given me what looks – from initial testing – to be a neat application and made it possible for me to use another cool feature of OS X too !
I’ve converted from Outlook to Thunderbird for mail recently as well because the Thunderbird mbox mail folders format is the same on both platforms (Just drag it across and all mail is imported – I love open file formats)
“They should include sunbird in some future release of mozilla.
I use both mozilla mail as well as mozilla navigator, and I prefere to have them in a single bundle instead of separate firefox, and thunderbird. I would really welcome some new modules to mozilla.”
It’s been a component for the Mozilla suit (seamonkey) for ages. Altough not in the suit as default, it’s been avaliable for as an easy to install add-in all along (well almost).
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
Original developed for the OEone desktop, what I can remember.
http://www.axentra.com/products/#platform
So true indeed. Outlook (especially 2k3) is indeed far away from Mozilla. For instance the Query stuff you can do right now completely excels Thunderbirds complete set of features. Not to mention flagging etc etc…
I would love to switch to the Zilla platform for mail/calendar but it’s just that it’s like going back 3 years in time (excluded Thunderbirds excellent Spamfilter).
Nice to see work is progressing though, let’s hope we’ll see both Thunderbird and Sunbird implement some rocking features soon =)
You know… you are the exception. I do tech support and we have a client that’s a big industry here in Italy (biggest sales force deployed afaik). They have Outlook with distributed address books, and so on. You know what?
NOBODY uses the groupware/calendaring/advanced features of Outlook. Same goes for another big player where I worked some time ago (MIB30 company, that’s one of the 30 biggest companies in the italian shock exchange). They have TWO groupware suites (Outlook/Exchange and Notes) and guess what… they use none.
Maybe the groupware culture is more widespread in corporate america, but you know… not everybody lives there.
shock exchange = stock exchange
(given the crazy volatility of stocks I guess it was freudian…)
Simple, there is none!
This is cool, and I’ve used thunderbird calendar extension before, but what I’d really like to see is a function similiar to Outlook’s in that if I make an appointment it will pop up the little window reminding me in 15 minutes. Or if I don’t have email open, the popup will appear on the next time I open it.
Anyone know where I can get a Linux build of Sunbird without XFT support? I can’t stand XFT, I’ve had bad luck with trying to Mozilla products manually before, and Sunbird isn’t in Portage yet.
*sigh*
NOBODY uses the groupware/calendaring/advanced features of Outlook. Same goes for another big player where I worked some time ago (MIB30 company, that’s one of the 30 biggest companies in the italian shock exchange).
Wow, that sounds really odd. For any small company where I come from, sharing calendars is just so obvious, how would you otherwise schedule meetings with more than 1 person?
On the other hand, Querys in mail is hardly a groupware feature but rather a logical one for sorting out your e-mail.
I think you should ask yourself a question, would it be a wise decision in your company to use groupware features? If yes, then it’s simply a problem of IT staff not educating users (which is obviously very common).
Sometimes I think you americans live in wonderland… here back in italy the IT staff DOES NOT educate users at all because users DON’T CARE. Sometimes a poor soul tries, but practically nobody WANTS to go beyond the very very basic features.
People simply stop listening and stare to you blankly: if you ever did tech support you can catch this even on the phone by the tone of the voice.
How do you schedule meetings? Larger companies (like the one with domino+exchange) sometimes use custom made apps to book the meeting rooms, otherwise they simply tell every participant to come. With ANY means: email, telephone, cellphone, sms… there is NO organization at all.
People that has managed to send, receive and move around emails are done. They don’t set filters, they don’t use tags, they don’t make queries of vfolders (like evolution’s ones).
Welcome to the land of the lusers, friend!
I did not look at the Anonymous guy’s address: he’s Suede, not american. Well, we all know northern european guys are more organized, don’t we? 🙂