25
Aug 07

Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (August 25)

One more week has passed on the road to 0.7 and we’re making good progress on the release. No particular fix of the last week stands out, but many fix smaller issues that have been nagging people for quite some time.

Here’s the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

  • Bug 329034:
    async calICalendar methods and callbacks need request handles or ids
  • Bug 353567:
    Wrong default alarm set on new events (after start instead of before)
  • Bug 355226:
    Add Support for Attendees to the Google Calendar Provider
  • Bug 356533:
    Incomplete buttons with some themes
  • Bug 360533:
    [Proto] “Documents” label is misleading
  • Bug 362927:
    [Proto] Event dialog: “Options -> Link to documents” missess 3 dots in label
  • Bug 367163:
    Moving an event with timezone enabled via drag&drop changes time
  • Bug 370148:
    API enhancement: Providing free-busy information
  • Bug 373761:
    [Proto] Attendee invitation status is not accessible
  • Bug 377620:
    Localize ‘Do you want to save changes?’ dialog
  • Bug 385896:
    Reminder ‘1 week before’ doesn’t work
  • Bug 386706:
    update check should be disabled if not possible
  • Bug 388283:
    minimonth needs refresh to display all days of a recurrence bold
  • Bug 390523:
    Persist calendar visibility and selection in calendar list
  • Bug 391854:
    Task dialog: Can’t set due date to be different from entry date
  • Bug 392669:
    Image of toolbarbutton for today pane should be exchanged
  • Bug 392827:
    Duplicated function in calendar-management.js
  • Bug 392853:
    libical/calIDateTime’s subtractDate doesn’t honor timezones
  • Bug 393104:
    [Proto] Event dialog: Documents dialog uses hardcoded strings
  • Bug 393105:
    [Proto] Reminder dialog: localizability issues due to fixed width
  • Bug 393542:
    Startup error with fresh profile: composite.defaultCalendar has no properties
  • Bug 393596:
    JavaScript strict warnings in sun-calendar-event-dialog-attendees.xml

Thanks again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!


24
Aug 07

Winning the War on Regressions, War On Boxes — Test Day This Tuesday

Tons of new features and bugfixes have landed in recent weeks in preparation for the 0.7 release. We will spend the test day this Tuesday, August 28th focusing on verifying these bugs and on regression testing the calendar back-end, alarms, calendar list, and views.

One of the most exciting features to land in time for this test day is the resolution to the War On Boxes bug. This means that your events will now take up the entire width of the week and day view area until they collide with another event at the same time. This graphic shows it decently well. For a better view, install the nightly build and come to the test day!

Come out to the test day and celebrate with us as we take the new and improved day and week views through regression testing and bug verification. We hope to see you in #calendar-qa on Tuesday, August 28th. For all the details, please see our Test Day Wiki Page.

Happy Testing!


19
Aug 07

Answers to the future of Lightning post

In the last posting regarding the future of Lightning after Mitchell Baker’s Thunderbird announcement, I asked you to post your questions regarding this or other issues and that I would try to answer them in a followup-post.

So here it is:

  • Antonio Silva asks:
    I would like to know if the future releases of Lightning are going to have an agenda-like option – such as the one on Google Calendar?

    There are currently no plans to implement such an option. But I really like the idea of it.

  • Miles asks:
    On last OOOcon there was talk of integrating Th+Li as a Outlook killerapp into OOo. Is something happening on that front or was this more or less just a rumor or a wishful thought?

    The intent of Sun as a sponsor of OpenOffice.org as I understand it, was never to fully integrate Thunderbird into the OpenOffice.org codebase, but to improve its feature set, so that the combination of Thunderbird and Lightning would be come a viable solution for many people in combination with the existing OpenOffice.org suite. We are still absolutely committed to that goal, so no, this was not a wishful thought.

  • Martin asks:
    Do you have download stats for Lighting and for Sunbird? It would be interesting to know which one is more popular.

    We have regular download stats for Lightning, but not for Sunbird. I’m currently discussing possible options with the Mozilla Sysadmin team, to provide us with regular download stats for Sunbird as well. I’ll let you know, once this happens.

  • lfarkas asks:
    Is there any roadmap for 0.7, 0.9 and 1.0? I always miss these kind of roadmap with some kind of dates.

    Yes, there is a roadmap-like web page on wiki.mozilla.org, but it does not provide exact release dates, especially not for later releases like 0.9 and 1.0. You might also find the proposed feature list for 0.7, 0.9 and 1.0 interesting.

  • Walter asks:
    As many others I think that Offline support and PDA synchronization are the two big improvements that Lightning miss to became a killerapp. Do you have plan to support any of them before 1.0?

    We are hoping to implement offline support with the 0.9 release. We do not expect to implement device synchronization before the 1.0 release.

  • Matt asks:
    Any chance that Lightning and Sunbird will be available for Ubuntu on some repository?

    The current Ubuntu 7.10 Alpha builds have pre-built Sunbird and Lightning-extension packages in the repository by default.


18
Aug 07

Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (August 18)

Two more weeks on the road to 0.7 have passed and we’re making good progress on the release. None of the fixes in the last two weeks stands out really, but many of the latest fixes make life easier for the developers and will therefore spur future feature developments.

<Here's the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

  • Bug 354703:
    calDateTime::SubtractDate has unused variables and function calls
  • Bug 383462:
    VTODO with RRULE but no DTSTART causes exception, missing entries
  • Bug 384700:
    RDATE/EXDATE specified timezones get lost during ICS roundtrip
  • Bug 385743:
    [Trunk] Update from password manager to the new LoginManager
  • Bug 386370:
    Provide more localization possibilities for GDATA provider
  • Bug 388405:
    Unify calendar list between lightning and sunbird
  • Bug 389077:
    [Trunk] Sunbird needs to package sqlite3.dll, nssdbm3.dll
  • Bug 389244:
    Uninstall information of old version not cleared from registry when updating via auto update
  • Bug 389245:
    Clean up undismissed alarms on item modification/deletion
  • Bug 389303:
    Use one ellipsis character (…) instead of three dots (…)
  • Bug 389540:
    eliminate superfluous bindings in recurrence dialog implementation
  • Bug 389951:
    Close-button in Today-pane is checked
  • Bug 390226:
    [Trunk] Lightning breaks Thunderbird view layout
  • Bug 390942:
    Sync packages-static on Trunk and Mozilla-1.8 branch
  • Bug 391062:
    jsDate property is not correctly invalidated upon calDateTime modification
  • Bug 391506:
    Remove custom calUtils.js from gdata provider
  • Bug 391820:
    Addons manager breaks in calendar because MOZ_PLUGINS is disabled
  • Bug 392326:
    Always use C++ casts instead of NS_*_CAST macros
  • Bug 392387:
    New Event / New Task context menu command no longer works (regression)
  • Bug 392388:
    Changing date format or timezone preference causes error in calendar-management.js (regression)
  • Bug 392572:
    Correct comments in calIDateTime.idl

Thanks again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!


15
Aug 07

The future of Lightning… after the Thunderbird announcement

About two weeks ago, Mitchell Baker sent out her call for action for Mozilla Thunderbird, announcing that the Mozilla Corporation wants to move its focus exclusively to Mozilla Firefox. In later posts Mitchell posted further details about the initial announcement (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6, Link 7, Link 8)

Since Thunderbird is the base application for our main application/extension (Lightning), a lot of people have asked us, whether we would continue to work on Lightning as a Thunderbird extension.

The answer is YES! We’d like to state publicly that we will continue to work on our two products Lightning and Sunbird in the foreseeable future and that we still envision great things for Lightning and Thunderbird. We are currently hard at work for our next release 0.7 (coming this fall) and are starting the planning work for the following releases 0.9 and 1.0.

If you have any questions regarding this, feel free to post them as a comment and we’ll try to directly answer them there or answer them all in a follow-up post in this blog.


10
Aug 07

QA Working Session On Monday, Test Day On Tuesday

Two events will take place next week at Calendar QA.

Number One: There will be a QA working session on Monday, August 13th at 13:30 UTC. We’ll go through the list of unconfirmed enhancement bugs and discuss them to see what’s suitable for the 1.0 release.

Number Two: Our last test day was a success, and we had some first time testers in #calendar-qa. Thank you for contributing to our QA effort. Without you it wouldn’t be possible. So, we’re holding our next test day on Tuesday, August 14th and hope to see you again. This time we’ll try to confirm bugs on our unconfirmed list. It includes checking what other users have reported and possibly creating simpler steps to reproduce the bug. You can find all the information on our Test Day wiki page.

We look forward to seeing you in #calendar-qa on Monday, August 13th and Tuesday, August 14th.

Happy Testing!


02
Aug 07

Lightning/Sunbird Status Update (August 03)

Hi guys,
another 10 days have gone by and I want to keep you informed about the latest new stuff that is going into the tree. The most notable fix in the last 10 days was the fix for bug 386589, which switches the new prototype event dialog on. This is something that we have been waiting for for a long time. Please help us in testing this and all the other stuff that has gone in lately.

Here’s the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

  • Bug 313822:
    Make Lightning work on SeaMonkey, step 1
  • Bug 363441:
    Same item from different calendars
  • Bug 370305:
    Timepicker: double-click on hours shoud set minute to 00
  • Bug 371917:
    make the prototype event dialog work for sunbird
  • Bug 373983:
    Double click on calendar does not open properties dialog
  • Bug 375389:
    Allow mouse wheel scrolling in rotated view
  • Bug 376086:
    added missing labels for view context menu
  • Bug 378270:
    Remove ‘Rotate’ button and move the rotate option to the views menu
  • Bug 380335:
    Add picture to task in month view
  • Bug 384779:
    Some entities in connection.dtd should be moved to advanced.dtd
  • Bug 386558:
    change event fired without date actually having changed
  • Bug 386589:
    promote the prototype event dialog as standard dialog
  • Bug 386714:
    Encapsulate Lightning’s view-deck in vbox as it is in Sunbird
  • Bug 386925:
    Sunbird Trunk fails to build (Error: Cannot open include file nsBuildID.h)
  • Bug 387425:
    add ka and lt to calendar/locales/shipped-locales
  • Bug 388016:
    Mode Toolbar: Visual Fine Tuning
  • Bug 388216:
    Event Listeners are not removed in views
  • Bug 388566:
    Set a minimum width for calendar and mode toolbar icons
  • Bug 389036:
    recurring task: only first instance is shown in agenda
  • Bug 389158:
    Event Listeners are not removed in todo-list.js
  • Bug 389164:
    Category preferences: doubleclick to edit category
  • Bug 389294:
    Today Pane: Border is too thick in events section
  • Bug 389397:
    Use async providers > reload remote calendars doesn’t work
  • Bug 389536:
    address style nits in all files under prototypes/wcap
  • Bug 389693:
    Event dialog: File->New->Event fails

A huge ‘Thanks’ goes out to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!


02
Aug 07

Lightning on SeaMonkey: News from the front

Hi everyone,
two days Robert Kaiser (KaiRo) checked in a fix for bug 313822, thereby enabling Lightning as an extension for SeaMonkey.

As this has been a long-standing request from SeaMonkey users (since we officially retired the Calendar extension over 20 months ago), I want to address some questions and issues up-front:

Which versions of Seamonkey does Lightning support?

Lightning support is only available for current trunk builds of SeaMonkey (code-named Suiterunner). These builds will one day become SeaMonkey 2.0.

Why are the current Seamonkey 1.1.x releases and the old 1.0.x releases not supported?

Both the 1.1.x and the 1.0.x releases are based on older code (XPFE) which is technically incompatible with Lightning. Therefore Lightning will not be available for those releases.

Will future releases of Lightning be made available for SeaMonkey as well?

No. Lightning support for SeaMonkey is currently experimental and there are known issues, which need to be resolved first. In addition, only Lightning builds from the trunk will work with SeaMonkey, but the developer focus is currently on the Mozilla 1.8 branch, as this is the code that the current Thunderbird release is based on. Lightning developer focus will only switch to what is now the trunk, once Thunderbird 3 is released. We expect the Thunderbird 3 release within the next 12-24 months.

Does this mean that SeaMonkey will only be a 2nd-class-citizen?

Yes, that is true. As the Lightning developers do not currently focus their efforts on the trunk and as no Lightning developers use SeaMonkey as their mail client, SeaMonkey will remain a 2nd-class-citizen until both of these facts change.

Does this mean that I shouldn’t file any bugs?

No. Please file bugs as you find them (but please search for duplicates first). However, all bugs filed by SeaMonkey users must be cross-checked with either Sunbird or Lightning on Thunderbird first, to identify whether a bug applies to Sunbird or Lightning on Thunderbird (or both) as well.

What happens if a SeaMonkey user does not cross-check a bug with Sunbird or Lightning on Thunderbird first?

All bugs, which have not been cross-checked with Sunbird or Lightning on Thunderbird will be resolved as INCOMPLETE immediately. They will only be reopened, once the cross-check with Sunbird or Lightning on Thunderbird has been performed.

What about bugs that apply only to Lightning on SeaMonkey?

A new component named “Lightning: SeaMonkey Integration” has been created for bugs, that relate only to the integration of Lightning into SeaMonkey. The policy described above does not apply to bugs filed in this component.