22
Mar 10

[March 22, 2010] Lightning Status Update

As we’re moving closer towards our next release, Lightning 1.0 beta2, it’s time to talk more about our recent accomplishments and bugfixes. We’ve been pretty active in the last six weeks and over 40 bugfixes have made it into our code repository.

Overall we have fixed an impressive 43 bugs since February 8. Here’s the complete list of fixed bugs:

  • Bug 349996: Multiselection should be enabled to remove more than one category
  • Bug 351321: Italic and bold font for high and low priority
  • Bug 359016: JS error ‘this.currentItem has no properties’ in calItemBase propertyEnumerator
  • Bug 392737: Event dialog: No ‘save and close’ function in the new event file menu
  • Bug 395287: Event dialog: Cannot enable timezone option for ending time
  • Bug 405439: Recurring task -> repeating rule shows wrong start/end time
  • Bug 413296: Leaking object on window-close
  • Bug 416614: Doesn’t show completely an alarm when need to slide to select it
  • Bug 455232: Query for supported-calendar-component-set in case servers don’t support tasks/events
  • Bug 460030: Get rid of resize handler, use flex to draw view columns
  • Bug 465317: Today and Navigation Buttons need to be polished
  • Bug 476227: Drop shadow for multiday events has incorrect length
  • Bug 490169: Should be an easily-accessible option to fire an alarm “on time”
  • Bug 490303: Invites aren’t sent when using Sun Calendar Server and the meeting arranger is wrong
  • Bug 491254: Some languages need weekdays in plural form for some sentences in Recurrence Summary
  • Bug 498690: Support for webdav-sync spec
  • Bug 500283: Keyset in event-edit-dialog should be localizable
  • Bug 510930: Titlebar text is wrong when switch between Month/Multiweek
  • Bug 515643: Lightning messes up Thunderbird’s File->New submenu
  • Bug 519225: Shared calendar still shows events deleted by other calendar participants
  • Bug 525430: Task view doesn’t show the attachments for selected tasks
  • Bug 529813: Invite Attendees dialog: icons are messed up in case of missing participation role
  • Bug 533414: Drag shadow of events that span multiple days, doesn’t show the position of the whole event
  • Bug 534045: Invite Attendees dialog: icons are messed up in case of participation role NON-PARTICIPANT
  • Bug 538589: Remove button removes the reminder following the selected one in the list
  • Bug 538873: CalDAV: Cannot Delete Event
  • Bug 539512: Font Color changes with Persona’s Skins
  • Bug 539681: Puerto Rico Holidays
  • Bug 542210: Lightning does not update Sun Calendar
  • Bug 543698: Moved occurrences of repeating all-day events are displayed on new and original date
  • Bug 543744: Add calendar name to event tooltip information
  • Bug 544082: Update failing Mozmill tests
  • Bug 544682: Months should be viewed with different color to avoid confusion
  • Bug 544842: Nothing appears as “checked” when submenus “Progress” & “Priority” are opened
  • Bug 544858: Adjust Lightning version for GData provider on mozilla-1.9.2/mozilla-central
  • Bug 546300: Octal Numeric Constants are deprecated
  • Bug 546943: Don’t display drop shadows when dragging back to original date
  • Bug 550291: AsyncPromptAuth method is not implemented in calAuthUtils.jsm
  • Bug 550789: Update links for Lightning nightly builds
  • Bug 551147: Remove obsolete lightning/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.1 folder from ftp server
  • Bug 551231: Make xpcshell-based unit tests pass in JavaScript strict mode
  • Bug 552042: Calendar registry not written after creating/deleting calendar
  • Bug 552303: Errors while threading disabled

As always, our thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that have made this possible.


19
Mar 10

Reducing the Calendar bug count

We (mostly our lead developer Philipp) have done some heavy lifting with our bug database in recent days. During the last month, we waded through hundreds of bug reports (some of those being several years old) to see whether those bugs had been fixed by all the work that we’ve put into Lightning 1.0 beta1.

The result of this exercise was a reduction of our total open bug count by nearly 18% or in absolute terms, we’ve reduced the number of open bugs by 276 from 1552 to 1276. This chart illustrates our total open bug count from the start of 2010 until mid-March:

It’s important to note that not every bug in our database is a real program error. Our bug list also contains lot of enhancement request, project management issues and enhancement requests. Basically everything that comes up in our project that needs to be tracked somehow is entered in our bug database, so that it can be easily tracked.


12
Mar 10

Sunbird 1.0b1 release candidate 1 is now available

After quite some build-system related difficulties, we have finally succeeded building Sunbird 1.0b1rc1. Please download and test it within the next 2 weeks, if no critical errors show up this will afterwards become the final version 1.0b1.

Candidate builds for Sunbrid 1.0 beta1 in 37 languages are available as of now for:

A corresponding build of the Google Calendar Provider is available at addons.mozilla.org

Please tell us what you think of these candidate builds and file bugs in Bugzilla as you go.


05
Mar 10

How to solve incompatibility problems when upgrading to Thunderbird 3.0.3

Some of our users currently seem to experience problems with Lightning becoming incompatible when they update their Thunderbird installation to the 3.0.3 release.

The reason for this seems to lie in the fact that those users use a Lightning nightly build and update it on a daily basis with the Lightning Nightly Updater add-on or manually update to the latest available nightly build. But because we moved our Lightning nightly builds to only support the current Thunderbird 3.1 development builds, as reported earlier, this leads to the incompatibility.

The solution is simple though:
Just uninstall your current nightly build and install the Lightning 1.0 beta1 release. This release is identical to the latest available Lightning nightly builds for Thunderbird 3, but fully compatible with the Thunderbird 3 release. And to be on the safe side: Please backup your profile folder, before doing this!


04
Mar 10

Lightning users on Thunderbird are in the majority for the first time

Three weeks ago, I shared some usage statistics for Lightning with you.

One of the things that I looked at then was the adoption of Thunderbird among Lightning users. Back then Thunderbird 3 users were still lagging behind, but now I can report that on the last weekend, the ratio of Lightning users on Thunderbird 3 was higher than the ratio of Thunderbird 2 users for the first time. Here’s the graph showing the steady increase of Thunderbird 3 usage since November 25th in 2009, when the first release candidate for Thunderbird 3 was released.

As already noted in the earlier article, the ratio of Thunderbird 3 users is much higher on the weekends compared to the Thunderbird 2 users. But even during the workweek we’re catching up pretty fast, even faster than on the weekends.

Interested observers will notice that the graph in this post and the earlier graph differ slightly. The reason is that in the current chart I’ve also incorporated the numbers of pre-release versions, like 3.0 beta3 or 2.0.0.24pre.

And if someone is asking himself why I only list Thunderbird 3 and Thunderbird 2 ratios here, the answer is that all other versions, e.g. users of Thunderbird 3.1 nightly builds, Thunderbird 1.5 users, SeaMonkey users and people that installed Lightning into Firefox all taken together account for not more than 0.5% of our total active daily users.

I hope that you will find this as interesting as I do.