Two weeks ago, I was interviewed by the Bavarian broadcasting station here in Germany for their weekly computer radio show. The interview went pretty well and we covered a lot of areas, including:
- Current project situation
- History of the project
- Major pain points of radio listeners with our applications (enterprise features vs. small business feature set, mobile phone synchronization)
- Project roadmap
- Contributing to an open source project
You can listen to the podcast of the show by downloading the mp3 file (the interview covers the last eight minutes). As this was a German radio station, the interview was conducted in German as well. Sorry to all our non-German-speaking folks about that.
Nevertheless, this gives us some much needed publicity, for which we are grateful. We are already discussing some followup actions with the radio folks. More about this, when things get more concrete.
Great interview & interesting insights!
It reminded me of donating to the project – something I should have done some time ago! :)
Also, I like the notion of focusing on the needs of small business/private users, rather than enterprise features. I’m looking forward to further options of contributing to the project as a non-programmer!
Greetings from Germany,
Johannes
Thanks for the link to the nice interview!
My 2 cents about the phone sync: just provide an awesome, open API and let plug-ins do the rest.
regards
Marco
Hi Simon,
in my opinion, it’s no longer important to support direct sync with mobile devices. The better feature is sync between the mobile device and the calendar server, because you can sync anywhere.
This is supported by many calender servers today, e.g. the Google Calendar: http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html
For me the most important features are in the area of group calendaring to organize meetings with several people. For private users it’s important, that everybody might use different calendar servers…
Best Regards,
Jörg
“in my opinion, it’s no longer important to support direct sync with mobile devices. The better feature is sync between the mobile device and the calendar server, because you can sync anywhere.”
As someone remarked iirc on the newsgroup some time ago: It might not be desirable to put the calendar somewhere on the Net …
Hi Simon,
what about the syncML protocol to sync with mobile carrier servers?
some of them support it already in some incarnations on serverside…
Thunderbird 2 has a plugin that supports syncing of calender data from lightning as well.
BTW good interview…
Hi,
can you please give some news about next releases ?
Tks,
Yes, please give some news about the planning for those who can’t listen radio interview.
Wasn’t the RC expected for july or august ?
String freeze for the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 1.0beta release on June 23 [UPDATE]
I’m sorry, but I totally forgot to tell, that we currently expect to have the 1.0 beta release ready in about four (4) weeks from now. So that should hopefully give every localizer enough time, who have not been following our checkins on a daily or weekly basis.
I’ll inform you as soon as I know about a definitive code freeze and release date.
String freeze for the upcoming Lightning/Sunbird 1.0beta release on June 23 [UPDATE]
I’m sorry, but I totally forgot to tell, that we currently expect to have the 1.0 beta release ready in about four (4) weeks from now. So that should hopefully give every localizer enough time, who have not been following our checkins on a daily or weekly basis.
I’ll inform you as soon as I know about a definitive code freeze and release date.
Hello,
BUG report: I don’t know if it is duplicate or not but
TB2.x with Lightning 0.9 caldav is prompting for username password for a remote calendar
Tb3.0b4+ Lightning nightly 22 and 23 september 2009 I have no prompt for username/password and so not bale to retrieve the calendar. Not possible to test tb3.0b4 with Lightning 0.9 as the UI is then completely crap.
Continue the good work
Kind REgards
Is this blog dead?
There has been no update for 26 days!
Is there another (more active) calendar blog?
I’m a bit scared from the absence of posts on Bugzilla.
Calendar project should be near the beta and the work should be more, instead on Bugzilla there is a very low activity. Is there a reason?
Hi guys,
i think you are doing a difficult but a great work on lightning.
Please don’t give up and give some news for those like me who made donations…
I think this project has made a very good progress in the last couple of days. The calendar extension can now be added on the SeaMonkey beta 2.0b2. I’ve been using it and yes there are couple of issues but all in all it is working. Good work to all those who have been working on this project.
For those curious on whats going on here is a list of recently fixed bugs.
ok, the html tag was screwed up. Here is the raw link.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&classification=Client+Software&product=Calendar&component=Alarms&component=Build+Config&component=Calendar+Views&component=E-mail+based+Scheduling+(iTIP%2FiMIP)&component=General&component=Import+and+Export&component=Internal+Components&component=Lightning+Only&component=Lightning%3A+SeaMonkey+Integration&component=Preferences&component=Printing&component=Provider%3A+CalDav&component=Provider%3A+GData&component=Provider%3A+ICS%2FWebdav&component=Provider%3A+Local+Storage&component=Provider%3A+WCAP&component=Security&component=Sunbird+Only&component=Tasks&component=Website&target_milestone=1.0&long_desc_type=substring&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr&status_whiteboard=&keywords_type=allwords&keywords=&bug_status=RESOLVED&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=exact&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailqa_contact2=1&emailtype2=exact&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&cmdtype=doit&order=Last+Changed&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=
@ aerosmith:
I do believe the project makes progress but not this much (275 bugs in the last days?).
I understand some German and the interview covers some of the problems associated with projects like this. But still… I would expect some focus on the more important issues. There are three bugs blocking the beta and there seems to be little activity for the last few weeks.
I appreciate the work that is being done and do hope that in the background the project is still on schedule.
It is important to keep (future) users interested in the project. No news and no apparent activity turn people away from the calendar project, possibly never to return again.
So a sign of life would be nice, at least a small update on the bugs been fixed. The beta release is expected in three weeks from now, according to the comments added September 23. Why is this announced in a comment and not a separate post?
@MarcoS
I am simply an end user tracking the bugs that is all. So, I do not know anything about the lightning development. Your questions could be answered by the lightning management team. Sorry.
I understand. Only the first sentence should be addressed to you. Not all bugs the link refers to are recently fixed.
The rest of my comment is without a doubt meant for the calendar team.
Any chance of a transcript so people who don’t speak German can at least stick it through Google Translate? :-)
I assume there are more people like me missing coherent information on this web site about lightning’s/sunbirds (future) ability to sync with mobile devices.
The most interesting places I found:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303963
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Device_Sync
In the radio interview Simon says that technical problems are responsible for the missing sync features of Mozilla Calendar: There are too many different mobile platforms so that first there has to be established a market-wide standard before Mozilla can do anything about this.
However the discussion under the aforementioned links seems to be suggesting that such a standard is already existing: SyncMl and OpenSync. I understand that the Mozilla Calendar team is having difficult times, but there is a serious lack of information: What’s your take on these frameworks? Please make this information easily accessible on this website.
@Jörg (“it’s no longer important to support direct sync with mobile devices”): I totally disagree with you. I do not the see the future of PIM in putting my personal contact and calendar data on a server run by any company. Even less if the company’s CEO has the following understanding of privacy: http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-people
Kudos for maintaining such a wonderful weblog. this weblog happens to be not just useful but also very artistic too. We find only few experts who are capable of write technical articles that creatively. I search for articles on this topic. I Myself went through several websites to build up on knowhow with respect to this. Keep up the good work !!