Annoyances Wrapup

Thank you very much for the feedback on my last blog post. I’d like to give a short wrap-up and comment on some of the mentioned annoyances.

  • Multiple Password Prompts – Sorry, this one isn’t trivial to solve. The issue lies somewhere in the Mozilla Platform and how we interact with it.
  • Send Reminder via Email – This means you need to have Thunderbird running for it to send you an email. Is that really what you want?
  • Move Lightning’s tab in front of inbox/Tab closing order – More of a Thunderbird issue. You might want to watch bug 508776
  • Invitations with Provider for Google Calendar – I have a possible fix for this, I’ll see that this makes the next release (bug 684482)
  • Descriptive Errors on Failure – This means string changes, which we can’t do this late in the cycle. We did add some debug messages for the ics provider though
  • Disappearing Calendars – Unfortunately I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue, so its hard for me to actually fix it
  • Editing invitation email – This needs some Thunderbird changes which are not part of Thunderbird 8. Maybe for Thunderbird 9 though!
  • Alarms showing multiple times – I’ll take another look into this bug, I thought I got rid of that for the last release!
  • Failures Dismissing recurring events – We’re doing our best to fix this bug for the release
  • Offline Support – Well, that’s not exactly very small….but on the bright side, this was planned already! Support has landed and will be part of 1.0rc2, which is due very soon (today, tomorrow)
  • Flickering in the views – I agree this is a very annoying bug. Unfortunately its not trivial to fix and requires massive changes in the views and/or backend architecture. As much as I’d like to make it a part of 1.0, I doubt its reasonable.
  • Snoozed alarm fires at old event time – Yes, working on this!
  • New Calendar Wizard – While a lot of work was done in the Summer of Code, this is not quite ready yet. The Student is still in contact with me though and is working on fixing the remaining issues
  • Dual Boot – Until certain platform issues are fixed, this is not feasible, sorry
  • Copy entire recurring event – We need some good UI for this, how would we know if the user wants to move the master or just an occurrence?
  • Multiday scrolling issues – I’ll look into this and see what I can do
  • Events being an hour off on DST change – I’ll also take a look here
  • Import/Export issues – This isn’t much of a focus for 1.0, but if its an easy fix I’m happy to consider
  • text/plain on caldav – I can imagine allowing this might cause issues for items that are really just text/plain, i.e documents uploaded to the same collection. This would cause an error message for those events. Can’t this be fixed on the server side?
  • Hooks/Refresh Killer – Refresh Killer is already in, Mohit is working on the hooks patch, which will make it in too.

I’ll do my best to round off these edges to make 1.0 the best Lightning release you’ve seen to date!

14 comments

  1. I post this two bug too:
    refresh killer: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502936
    hooks / stubs mechanisms: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=586276
    What do you think about?

  2. I realize the “Move Lightning’s tab in front of inbox/Tab closing order” is more of a Thunderbird issue, but anything you can do to prompt, or assist, action on that bug would be greatly appreciated. It annoys me multiple times each day.

  3. Philipp Kewisch

    Alessio, sorry I didn’t mention. I’ve updated the post.

  4. In the task list, tasks don’t actually get the color of the task category. :-(
    There’s a whole bucketload of google hits on how to fix this, and few of them seemed current. Will a fix for this make 1.0? :-)

  5. Thanks for working on calendar! Using Lightning (and have been using it for… three years? now), pretty happy with it.
    I had an annoyance – I wanted to disable sending invite acceptance mail, always. But then I wrote a bootstrapped addon with a sledgehammer-style approach (no-op the relevant function in JS), so I’m good now :) Just thought you might be interested, anyway.

  6. “Send Reminder via Email – This means you need to have Thunderbird running for it to send you an email. Is that really what you want?”
    How you mean? Dont’t need Thunderbird to run lightning!?
    I would love to see a stand alone version of Lighting or an updated Sunbird.

  7. Thanks for your hard work and the detailed response to your “bug-query”.
    Btw I really appreciate some more frequent but maybe shorter posts on this blog to stay in touch with the developement process even if one is not actually involved in it.

  8. BUG: Lightning does not function properly on portable (PAF) Thunderbird versions 8 Beta1 and Beta2. When the portable Thunderbird 8.0 folder is moved, the calendar is lost. Apparently Lightning 1.0 RC is installing on Thunderbird 8 with reference to PC locations other than just the Thunderbird portable file.

  9. Hi Philipp, thanks for the list. I think this is a usefull ressource. I would appreciate if you could add some bug numbers, I have just done my best to find some of them …
    Multiple password dialogs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349641
    Send reminder mails: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360799
    Editing Invitation mail: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433848
    Failures Dismissing recurring events: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=533654
    Snoozed alarm fires at old event time: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360916
    Offline Support: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380060
    New Calendar Wizard: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378873

  10. Show all today events in “Lightning tab” even when their time has passed (gray them out).

  11. I forgot that there is bug already open for my request:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412740

  12. Lightning not functioning on portable (PAF) versions of Thunderbird 8.0. Bug=696383

  13. Hi Philipp, thanks again for all the work. I will test the RC2 build (and further builds). Curious to see offline mode in action.

  14. Copy entire recurring event – We need some good UI for this, how would we know if the user wants to move the master or just an occurrence?
    I guess a simple UI which will ask the user to choose between the copy of the entire recurrence or only the selected occurrence should work well. In fact, this dialog already exists for the deletion of an event.
    The copy of a recurring event between calendars is a feature which would seriously help people who manage calendars on behalf of other ones.
    Thx