Mozilla Calendar Project Blog Its about time for some news…

When I arrived at the Mozilla Firefox+ Summit 2008 on the 28th, I was surprised to hear, that Google announced the release of CalDAV support for Google Calendar while I was up in the air. At first I thought Simon was joking when he told me, but he was not!
I had very mixed feelings on this step. On one side this is a really great step. Supporting CalDAV means that more applications will be able to natively read and write to Google Calendar, without the need for third party applications that proxy the write process through the web-based API. In the long run this means less work for me since at some point the Provider for Google Calendar will not be needed anymore. Instead of fixing the Provider for Google Calendar, I can focus on CalDAV bugs, which benefits both Google users and those of other servers. Also this is something I’ve been hoping for a while now and have asked Google employees about in the past.
On the other side, I was of course a bit disappointed, that all the work and pain I’ve put into the Provider for Google Calendar is now being made obsolete. This didn’t last long though, since thats just the way it goes with software and I was always aware that at some point something like this would happen. Nevertheless I have no regrets since I think I’ve done a great deal for users of the Provider and the feedback I’ve gotten was overwhelming (and mostly positive). Writing the Provider also taught me a great deal about the Mozilla codebase and how the calendar application works, so it was definitely worth it!
Since the above sounds much like I’m going to drop work on the Provider right away and suggest to use CalDAV, let me tell you that it is quite the contrary. As noted in Google’s blog post, the release of CalDAV support is developer-focused. There are a number of known issues and application support is currently quite minimal. At the time of release, as far as I know only Apple iCal actually works. Therefore, I’d still suggest to use the Provider for Google Calendar until Google’s CalDAV server is more mature.
Using a few workarounds introduced in bug 448561 and bug 451455 I was able to make Sunbird/Lightning’s CalDAV work with Google. If you are interested in testing, please feel free to take a look at the latest nightlies (Sunbird / Lightning).
Philipp

We’re getting nearer and nearer to our first 0.9 release candidate. With 34 bugs fixed in the last two weeks, many of them release blockers, we’re now down to only 18 release blockers at the time of writing. 10 of those 18 bugs currently still need a patch, so if anyone of our readers wants to help out, now would be a great time.

On the localization front, 30 of our 33 are ready for the release (hopefully Macedonian, Slovenian and Turkish will still be able to make it), so we’ll likely be in better shape l10n-wise than we were during the time of the 0.8 release.

For anyone interested, here are the 34 bugs fixed within in the last two weeks:

• Bug 199732
  Events spanning days are seen as multiple events (display)
• Bug 311773
  Initial landing of the Islandic Calendar localization
• Bug 348264
  ORGANIZER property lost after import + export
• Bug 363932
  Delete Warning should be redesigned
• Bug 390313
  Tooltip too narrow with some Windows themes, text is truncated (regression)
• Bug 412606
  Storage provider does not store X-params of attendees
• Bug 421716
  CalDAV provider should support getctag
• Bug 434354
  CalDAV provider should cope with multiple principal-collection-sets
• Bug 435174
  Today Pane not displayed after startup when using Spamato extension [Error: LOG is not a function]
• Bug 437412
  Zero-length and short events are shown at the wrong times in the timegrid (regression)
• Bug 437420
  Wrong display of WCAP all day events in the unifinder
• Bug 440106
  Editing of an event on a cached calendar in online mode isn’t possible
• Bug 444276
  Try to accept a iTIP/iMIP invitation (open Mail in a separate window) -> select calendar dialog is empty
• Bug 440358
  No WCAP calendar events visible after restart of sunbird
• Bug 440700
  [Trunk] Cannot switch back from Calendar to Mail Mode [Error: mailToolbarMenuItem is null] (regression)
• Bug 442915
  Warning: reference to undefined property this.mTaskArray[aRow]
• Bug 445287
  Cache combined with read-only calendar spawns error flood
• Bug 445492
  Use ‘DEL’ key to delete an event of a rule -> ‘Deleting Repeating Event’ dialog starts two times.
• Bug 445731
  Editing an saved event with an attendee -> 2 mails were send, one ‘Event Invitation’, one Event Canceled’
• Bug 445995
  Event dialog also contains elements from task dialog (regression)
• Bug 446512
  Recent nightlies of Lightning cause NULL-pointer dereference crash in TB
• Bug 447997
  Multiweek View doesn’t update when changing menu View -> Number of Weeks selection
• Bug 448206
  Calendar creation wizard acting weird when creating a calendar with duplicate URI
• Bug 448325
  Today Pane context menu: Delete command inside ‘Convert To’
• Bug 448453
  Caldav Calenders working with 0.8 don’t load under 0.9pre
• Bug 448753
  Lightning and GData Provider are incompatible to Thunderbird 3b1pre (Gecko 1.9.1) builds
• Bug 448803
  CalDAV provider should not query-by-uid for moved items
• Bug 448886
  Unable to edit event: comes up with attendee confirmation
• Bug 448946
  Switching calendar views via keys ALT+[1-4] is broken
• Bug 449031
  Add meta data API to memory/storage
• Bug 449177
  Support free-busy querying for the GData Provider
• Bug 449424
  Error “Component is not defined” in calendar-dnd-listener.js and sun-calendar-event-dialog-recurrence.js
• Bug 449917
  Opening context menu without having selected an item reveals blank entry
• Bug 449964
  2008-08-07 gdata-provider is last one that works

Many thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that make this possible.

Sunbird and Lightning both have a feature called the “unifinder”. It’s the box at the top if you click the toolbar “Find Events”. Next to the search text field you can select different time ranges to be scanned matching your search (or just present all matching the range if you leave it blank). The drop down box offers several time ranges, such as “All Events”, “Today’s Events”, “Next 7 Days”, …

While the ranges look sensible, they cause me some headache, more specifically the unbounded ranges “All Events” and “All Future Events” w.r.t. infinite recurring events. If you select one of the unbounded ranges (e.g. “All Events”), the current implementation will only show the master items of recurring events, because there’s no finite range to expand into. It shows the events in their condensed (unexpanded) form. While this approach misaligns the UI a bit (the other filters show recurring events in expanded form), it looks like a feasible way at first glance (modulo bugs around it). But there’s yet a further problem with this approach: You could override´single occurrences of a recurring series, e.g. modify the start and end of an occurrence. Those are currently left out.

The latter and the inconsistent UI let me doubt that showing event series in condensed form is really what we want here, moreover because IMO showing expanded occurrences is far more intuitive. Solving the problem, I can imagine two solutions:

• We simply drop the unbounded ranges (no “All Events”, no “All Future Events”).
• We dynamically expand the list as the user is scrolling it down, if this feels good.

For the moment, until we have a good solution, I’d vote to remove the unbounded ranges.

I hope there are more options that we could consider, and would like to hear your feedback on this topic…

Recently I was thinking about how we could show to people the progress in terms of activity, feature work and bug fixing that the Calendar Project has seen in the last few years. I came up with a number of bugzilla reports showing the number of bugs fixed per quarter since the inception of the Calendar Project.

I put all those numbers into a spreadsheet and created a graph from that and here it is:

While it’s important to note that not all bugs are equal (A very complex thing like “Support device sync” would be one bug as would be something trivial as “Change window title from ‘Edit event’ to ‘Open event'”), I think it still gives a good sense on the kind of increased activity that one could notice within the last few years in the Calendar project.

If anyone is wondering why we had such a huge drop of fixed bugs in Q2 2007, that was due to one of our key contributors being away for a few weeks in that time frame and the other developers waiting for him fixing a particular bug that was blocking the 0.5 release that was supposed to be released in that time frame.

As promised here is a new status update.

As you can see, the last 16 days have brought us a huge load of 45 bug fixes in anticipation of the upcoming 0.9 release. Unfortunately, due to the high amount of remaining blocking bugs (28 at the time of writing) we had to postpone the originally planned release date of 0.9 RC1 to a later date. I’ll keep you posted on this.

Here’s the list of all the 45 bug fixes:

• Bug 319909
  Failure to properly serialize/unserialize ics ATTACH properties
• Bug 352213
  Localizability issues with newevent.recurrence.every.label in calendar.dtd
• Bug 374464
  Context menu: rename Edit Item / Delete Item entry to Edit / Delete
• Bug 409845
  ‘Preferences’ and ‘Quit Thunderbird’ are disabled in Calendar mode and Task mode
• Bug 409921
  Implement CalDAV scheduling
• Bug 411799
  fixing potential etag PROPFIND / PUT race
• Bug 412962
  The filters of task pane should contain ‘Open Tasks’ or ‘Not Completed Tasks
• Bug 412971
  Bad formating of invitations – Weblinks in invitation unusable
• Bug 413103
  Unify and localize string building for time intervals [start + ‘ – ‘ + end]
• Bug 416239
  Crash on quit seems to point to libwebdav; eliminate use of webdav extension”
• Bug 423172
  Leaks in calRecurrenceInfo
• Bug 426153
  Add link to event page in event editing dialog
• Bug 428035
  Freebusy requests repeated on related scheduling outbox of every configured calendar
• Bug 428324
  Creating new profile fails on some systems; error in reading from storage.sdb”
• Bug 429255
  Lightning not emailing invites for CalDAV calendars
• Bug 430382
  Updated calendar views
• Bug 432417
  calRecurrenceInfo::onStartDateChange leaves wrong RECURRENCE-IDs
• Bug 435390
  Style sheet missing from iMip/iTip (regression)
• Bug 437441
  Finalize calendar-timezones.xpi
• Bug 437442
  Update timezone definitions
• Bug 438534
  Remove processor define for windows x64 build
• Bug 440017
  include config.mk before using INSTALL_LIGHTNING so that var can be set
• Bug 440022
  ensure that Lightning doesn’t have empty min/maxVersion in install.rdf
• Bug 442220
  WCAP event: Timezone UTC/GMT changed automatically to Europe/London
• Bug 442566
  make Lightning build on new shared calendar/mail/suite repository
• Bug 443722
  Add possiblity to change elements order in Edit Recurrence window
• Bug 444551
  Select an event in a readonly calendar and use the delete key -> error message
• Bug 444748
  Get rid of custom timezone service
• Bug 444822
  Add documentation to UI code and some UI code fixes
• Bug 444827
  Add binding for calendar captions
• Bug 445400
  Startup Error: ics-service doesn’t recognize own tzid: Asia/Choibalsan
• Bug 445488
  Mind default alarm setting if replying via invitations or event summary dialog
• Bug 445527
  Some keyboard shortcuts are not shown in menu (regression)
• Bug 445545
  Port Firefox/Thunderbird Bug 378598 to Sunbird
• Bug 445728
  Delete an single event of a recurring event with attendees -> ‘Notify Attendees’ dialog pops up 2x
• Bug 445982
  Task invitation via iTIP/iMIP doesn’t work (Disable task invitations)
• Bug 445997
  No email identity in calendar properties selected
• Bug 446170
  Lightning build bustage from bug 440017, remove config.mk inclusion on 1.8 only
• Bug 446190
  alarm service should mind disabled calendars
• Bug 446366
  Header of multiweek view always assumes the week to begin with Sunday
• Bug 446558
  Show tooltips in summary dialog
• Bug 446559
  Set CSS classes for invitations
• Bug 446666
  “Send attendees invitations via email” checkbox is disabled (grayed out)”
• Bug 447621
  All day event -> tooltip shows wrong date (start and end)
• Bug 447913
  CalDAV provider should avoid query-by-uid on after-PUT fetches

Many thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that make this possible.

I’ll be leaving today for the Mozilla summit in Whistler, Canada. Daniel, Philipp and Martin are also coming from the Calendar team as are hundreds of other key contributors from all major mozilla projects and products.
I hope to have some good discussions on the future of Mail & Calendar, localization and other issues that I’ve been pursuing. This will be a good time to finally meet in person many of the people that I’ve only been in contact with via newsgroups, mail and IRC.
You guys can also expect a new status update within the next few days. Until then…