Lightning 1.7 and a new Provider for Google Calendar

As you may have seen, Lightning 1.7 has been released. There are no major UI changes, most of the bugs fixed are us running after the changes in the core Mozilla platform (most notably removing e4x support, fixing sqlite statement wrappers) and backend fixes (cure excessive getItems requests when accessing calendars).

We have some improvements for Mac users in this release though: there is now support for some gestures in the calendar views. If you are on mac (or another machine with a touchpad that supports gestures), try the usual pinch, rotate and swipe gestures in the day, week, multiweek and month views.

Also, as mentioned in the previous blog post, I have rewritten the printing support to accommodate for the e4x backend changes. There might be some kinks, so please continue testing the print support in the release and file bugs or at least comment here as necessary. We have already noticed the “All day – All day”  bug.

You can view the full list of changes here on bugzilla.

Note also that if you are using the Provider for Google Calendar, you must update it to version 0.16. If you do not get the new version via automatic updates, please download it here from addons.mozilla.org.

40 comments

  1. Hi,

    I’m wondering about the Lightning 1.7 build for Solaris x86 platform. The build is not available yet in http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.7/
    Is it just a technical delay or support for Solaris platform is EOL?

    If possible please make available a build for Solaris platform.

    Thanks in advance,
    Victor

  2. Hi,
    please release a Solaris x86 Version.

    Regards

    Wolfgang

    • Sorry, the script to copy the contrib builds didn’t fire. I’ve taken care of this now, they have been moved to the releases/ dir.

  3. Hi all, I am wondering about the possibility to manage an event invitation with the google calendar. So far I am not able to add the invitations to the calendar managed by the google provider but only to local calendars.

    • Google Calendar has some trouble with invitations interoperability that I cannot influence, sorry. This might get better when I move the the new API, that is yet to be tested.

  4. Hi,

    My calendar has stopped sending invitations to events.
    I’ve have Thunderbird 15.0.1, Lightning 1.7 and davmail connected with an OWA.

    • Known issue, you are probably getting the same error messages as other commenters. This may also be the reason for your other issue.

  5. Hi,

    Is there any reason why the indication of “invitations to events pending to accept” has disappear from the bottom of my screen some versions ago?
    Algo, it seems to me that in previous versions the invitations pending to accept appeared in the calendar with a different color, but now they do not appear at all untill accepted. Am I correct?

    • We didn’t (knowingly) change anything to this feature, so it may be a bug. This may also have to do with the interoperability to your caldav server. Please enable calendar.debug.log and calendar.debug.log.verbose in the advanced config editor and restart, this will give you lots of debug info in the error console.

      • Hi Philipp,
        Thank you for your answers.
        Would you add a check on this point for the next revision? I find very important to have an indication of “not accepted” invitations, since sometimes an invitation can be lost in the inbox.
        I also find it interesting that these “not accepted” invitations appear in the calendar (in a different color) so you just can accept them from the calendar directly instead of looking the email entry.

  6. Hi,

    I am having hard time using tunderbird after the last update. It is “not responding all the time”.
    I have thunderbird + lightning + provider for google calendar (all updated to the last version), and I suspect the problem is with lightning. it always stops and restarts responding first; then thunderbird follows. It stops in coincidence with the snooze, then starts working again after some minutes until the next snooze.
    I have had a look around and have seen that quite many people is having similar problems. I have thunderbird on three pcs and I have problems in all of them.

    hope you can help us!
    thanks
    Marcello

    • Hi Marcello,

      I have not been able to pinpoint this issue since it doesn’t occur for me. I have the feeling it has to do with many events in the calendar, maybe if you don’t have too much private information in that calendar you can provide access for me so I can debug it?

      Philipp

  7. Hi

    I have TB 15.0 with Lightning 1.7 on Linux and I am also not able to send invitations to attendees of a meeting. I can edit the meeting, add persons but when I save no mail is send out. On the error console I get the following two error messages!

    Zeitstempel: 21.09.2012 18:04:47
    Fehler: [Exception… “‘TypeError: aItem.calendar.canNotify is not a function’ when calling method: [calIOperationListener::onOperationComplete]” nsresult: “0x8057001c (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_JS_OBJECT)” location: “JS frame :: resource://calendar/modules/calProviderUtils.jsm :: cPB_notifyOperationComplete :: line 650″ data: no]
    Quelldatei: resource://calendar/modules/calProviderUtils.jsm
    Zeile: 650

    Zeitstempel: 21.09.2012 18:04:47
    Fehler: [Exception… “‘TypeError: aItem.calendar.canNotify is not a function’ when calling method: [calIOperationListener::onOperationComplete]” nsresult: “0x8057001c (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_JS_OBJECT)” location: “JS frame :: resource://calendar/modules/calProviderUtils.jsm :: cPB_notifyOperationComplete :: line 650″ data: no]

    • This is a known issue, I will attempt to get a fix for this into the next release. Current workaround is to disable the cache, but please re-enable it again after the next release.

  8. I’m trying to install Lightning 1.7, or any recent version with Solaris 11 for x86 and Firefox 15

    the lightning.xpis file I find on your download site all say “not compatible with Firefox 15”. Please provide a support matrix of compatible versions,
    and give 10 lashes with a bullwhip to whoever lied and said they tested these as working.

    • Luckily we have no bulls doing our release and testing work, therefore a bullwhip is not the right tool :-) As you can see in the “Calendar Version Compatibility” link, conveniently placed right in the sidebar of this blog, Lightning is not compatible with Firefox but instead with Thunderbird!

      Lightning 1.7 is very much compatible with Thunderbird 15, honestly tested. In the future, please consider the language of your comments before posting.

  9. Thank you for the version matrix

    perhaps my mistake: opening a URL in Thunderbird opens the link in Firefox, and the .xpi extension had me dragging and dropping it in the wrong window. When I downloaded the .xpi to my local disk, closed Firefox, and unzipped the .xpi, I was able to successfully load Lightning 1.7 in Thunderbird 15, on Solaris 11 for x86.

    I consider the language of my comments perfectly fine and wonderful. I said nothing ‘obscene’ as defined by the US Supreme Court definition of obscenity, and if you do not think violence gets people’s attention and solves problems, you are not using enough of it.

    • Philipp Kewisch

      I didn’t say obscene. I just felt you are accusing us of doing wrong and not testing things, although we do. Now that you say Solaris, this is not one of the Tier 1 platforms and is only supported as a “contributed build”. This means we provide the builds as the Solaris folks upload them, but we don’t guarantee it works. There are often contributed solaris builds in the release folders.

  10. Is there any way to customize the Print Settings under 1.7? E.g., I’ve an All Day Event; when I print using either the Weekly Planner or Monthly Grid layout, the event prints as follows:: “All Day – All Day… [event details].” It prints and repeats “All Day” in each instance. The same is not true when I use the List print layout (doesn’t print All Day at all). I’d like to be able to print just the event w/o the “All Day” (esp. 2 of them). Is there any way to do so? Thanks … and thanks for all your great work!! – Chris

  11. I upgraded to Thunderbird 15 and Lightning 1.7 in hopes that the new version would be able to authenticate for CalDAV calendars. Unfortunately I find that this basic capability is still unavailable. Having set up the CalDAV URL as (e.g.)

    https://username:password@server.com:8443

    I get the following result when trying to create an event:

    Status Code: 403, The user lacks the required permission to perform the request.

    /ae33f078-e5e6-46db-b057-577cb0e900ee.ics

    The problem is obvious, but Lightning apparently has no ability to authenticate no matter what I do. If I set up the calendar without including the ‘user:password@’ component in the URL (which I’d rather not do anyway), it still doesn’t try to authenticate; it just fails.

    I previously used Thunderbird 3 with a pre-1.0 version of Lightning, and it didn’t surprise me all that much that it lacked this ability. That Lightning 1.7 still lacks it I find both astonishing and disappointing. Is there any prospect of this changing?

  12. An update to my previous comment: Starting with a fresh profile, I find I can get Lightning to prompt for authentication, but once it authenticates it is unable to synchronize; when I choose “Synchronize Calendars” in the context menu, all of my calendar items (local ones, too!) vanish (reappearing, thankfully, when Thunderbird is restarted), and nothing else happens. Looking at the access log on the server, I see an apparently endless stream of OPTIONS and PROPFIND requests on the CalDAV URL, halting only when I exit Thunderbird entirely.

    Any advice on troubleshooting? I mean, fair enough, I’ve had this Tbird profile for going on ten years now, I can understand that there might be some old settings or something that’d hose CalDAV authentication in Lightning. But the endless requests? That just doesn’t make sense to me.

    • Philipp Kewisch

      I think you have to doublecheck your caldav url. Unfortunately we don’t detect the collection from the main URL yet, so you have to add the URL to the exact collection this is in.

  13. I use different calendars and the appointments used to get the color of the selected caldendar.
    Since I use 1.7 the colors are gone and many appointments are not readable.
    To maken them readable I must use the categories, whcih are not synced with other calendar applications.
    Is this a bug or will this stay permanently?

    Pierre

  14. I just updated my Thunderbird to version 15 along with the new versions of Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar. While the program is doing all the synchronizations as it should, for some reason all the calendars look white. I have two different calendars that I’m synchronizing but the colors for them just don’t show on the calendar itself. On the list of calendars they each have the color I assigned to them, just not on the calendar. I tried changing colors to see if that would make a different but it idd not. Has this been reported by anyone? Thanks!

  15. Just downloaded Lightning 1.8 as needed for new Thunderbird 16.0 and Norton did not like it. Quarantined “calbasecomps.dll” and although Lightning now starts, all data is gone! Help!

    • Philipp Kewisch

      Sorry, this is an ongoing issue. I know what the problem is, its just not easy to fix it. Possibly this will look different with the next builds.

  16. Christophe Pauliat

    I need a Solaris X86 lightning add on for Thunderbird, but can’t find it.
    Have you excluded Solaris X86 and Sparc from supported OS ??

    Thanks

  17. Re: Lightning 1.8 and Norton issue, just downloaded latest Thunderbird update (16.0.1) which then required Lightning 1.8 which I downloaded again. This time Norton did NOT react and everything seems to be working OK.

  18. I have been using Lightning for our church calendar for most of the year. I print the calendar out for leaders. I have noticed the last two months (since the last update or two) that sometimes events print on the wrong day (usually the day following the right day) or they print twice (once on the right day, once once on the day following). When I double check to make sure the event is on the right day on the calendar I see that it is in both Google calendars and in Lightning. It seems to just be a printing problem. Any suggestions for a fix. It is wreaking havoc for our printed calendars.

    • We had to rewrite the print support for a Mozilla Platform change. There may be some regressions based on that. Could you try the nightly builds of Thunderbird and Lightning to see if this is still the case? I know we fixed a few problems, but we may not have got all of them.

      • I’m having the same problem with Lightning 1.8 as Tim. Some events show up on the wrong date when printing, despite the fact that they are correct in both Google Calendar and Lightning on the computer. Since I installed Lightning primarily in order to be able to print Google calendars in a better format that Google allows, this is very frustrating.

        • Philipp Kewisch

          Sorry, could you restate the exact issue? Maybe what the events have in common that are showing on the wrong day? (i.e they might all be on the first or last day/week of the print range?)

          • James Kaplan & Amy Egger

            My wife uses Thunderbird/Lightning to print out a monthly calendar of all the kids events. We just installed version 17, which prints both the start and the end time for each event in the monthly grip.

            As a result, with all the kids’ events, a single month will now span two pages. Is there any way to
            – not print the end time in monthly grid view
            – change the font size in monthly grid view

            so that we can fit everything on one piece of paper?

          • This sound like a bug, I recall seeing it fly by on bugzilla. Possibly this will be fixed in a later version.

          • I’m having the same issue as well. I have noticed that events on Tuesday after 5PM are printed on the next day. Very annoying.