Lightning — 15 comments
24
Jun 11

Lightning 1.0b4 Release Candidate 1 is available

The Thunderbird 5 release is just around the corner so its about time to provide a release candidate for the Lightning extension for calendaring. The upcoming version of Lightning will be called 1.0b4 and will be compatible with Thunderbird 5.

Unfortunately, this round of testing will be very very very short. Thunderbird 5 is slated for this Tuesday, the 28th and its critical that we have our release ready for this date. To compensate for the short period, we will be ready to spin another release if something major is broken, so if you are reading this after the release, please do file bugs as quick as possible if you find some.

Candidate builds for Lightning 1.0 beta4 in 36 languages are available as of now for:

A corresponding build of the Provider for Google Calendar is also available at those locations.

Note you will need Thunderbird 5 (or a beta thereof) to try it out. You are encouraged to back up your profile before upgrading. To install these builds in Thunderbird 5, please follow these steps:

  1. Download the build for your operating system to a folder on your hard disk.
    NOTE:Please make sure, that you right-click on the links above and choose “Save Link as…”. Otherwise Firefox will try to install Lightning and you will get an error message like “Lightning 1.0b4 could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox.”
  2. Open Thunderbird, then open its add-on manager via Tools –> Add-ons (or the corresponding entry in your language)
  3. Click on the Tools Icon, then select “Install Add-on from File…” and navigate to the lightning.xpi file that you just downloaded.
  4. Restart Thunderbird after the add-on installation has been performed. Voila!

Remember, testing is very important. The earlier errors are found, the faster we can react and possibly post another release on short notice.

Please tell us what you think of these candidate builds and file bugs in Bugzilla as you go. Thank you very much for your support, we couldn’t do it without you!

Project Updates — 5 comments
20
May 11

Calendar in Summer of Code

The community bonding phase of the Google Summer of Code 2011 is almost over so its about time to introduce our students to you. This year we have accepted two students for two very exciting projects.

Offline Support

The goal of the first project is to provide full offline support. The Student in charge here is Mohit Singh Kanwal. Mohit is a student developer from Singapore who got involved into open source and the Mozilla Calendar Project as part of the Google Summer of Code 2011. A beginner in Mozilla technologies, and code, Mohit hopes to work on the offline synchronization mode for lightning and hopefully by the end of the summer season, you can synchronize online and offline calendars. He blogs about the project here.

Improving the New Calendar Wizard

Another great project this year is improving the new calendar wizard. Lennart Bublies, 21 years old from Hamburg, Germany is working on making life easier for everyone adding a new calendar. Right now you need to enter the exact URL of your calendar. Lennart wants to improve this so you just need to enter the hostname. Read these words from Lennart:

Since summer 2009 I have been studying technical computer science at the University of Applied Science in Wedel. In addition to the university I am working in a small company, called Bit-Serv, in the area of system technology. When I’m not busy with computer science, i like to play guitar, listen to music, meet friends and I spend a lot of time outside.

I heard about Google Summer of Code via the Internet. For a few years I was waiting for an opportunity to work for a company like Mozilla, finally I have found the occasion.

Mozilla is an extraordinary open-source project. The dedication Mozilla has proven towards the community has always fascinated me – I have been using Firefox and Thunderbird for years and I am stoked. As a user of the Lightning extension I have had a few gripes and instead of asking the developers to fix it, I would like to use this opportunity to get involved myself. The project I am proposing has been a pet peeve of mine for some time now, every time I switch machines I need to find out the correct URL of my calendars. Completing this project would make my life easier and I think it would greatly benefit the Mozilla Calendar Project and its community.

Please give a warm welcome to our new contributors, I’m really looking forward to their work. Lets make this a great summer!

Project Updates — 2 comments
20
May 11

String Freeze and 1.0b4 Schedule

Hello Folks,

Following the Thunderbird Schedule, the Mozilla Calendar Project is
now officially string frozen. I have already announced preliminary
string freeze, but since then a lot has happened on the branching
landscape which caused some trouble in calendar land.

The following information is mainly for localizers, but also gives some details on the upcoming release.

Note that the tree has changed, to match for Thunderbird. Instead of
l10n-central, for your locale to be part of Lightning 1.0b4 you must
push to the new l10n-miramar repository. Thanks to Mark for his hard
work on getting things set up.

Deadline

The final deadline for calendar l10n matches the Thunderbird deadline
of June 7th. Since for Lightning there is not much difference
between the nightly and release builds, we will not be providing extra
beta builds. Translated extensions are available on a nightly basis
(sorry, no build-on-push yet!).

Dashboard

The dashboard is at https://l10n-stage-sj.mozilla.org/dashboard/?tree=calendar10x. 25 locales are already green, congrats!

en-US repository

The en-US repositories are at:
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-miramar
http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-miramar

Nightly builds:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-miramar

l10n repositories

The l10n repositories are at: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n-miramar

You want to clone yours via
hg clone ssh://hg.mozilla.org/releases/l10n-miramar/ab-CD/

Localized Nightly builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/latest-comm-miramar-l10n

Update: Signoffs are now open until June 7th. They are available here.

Lightning — 21 comments
11
Mar 11

Lightning Trunk Version Change

As you may have noticed if you are running a Thunderbird 3.3 alpha or nightly, Lightning has changed its version number from 1.1a1pre to 1.0b4pre. I’d like to take a moment and explain why we changed this and what effects it may have.

As mentioned on the Calendar Versions page, we need to follow the release cycle of Thunderbird. Users will (and have, in the past) massively complain if a new version of Thunderbird is released without a corresponding Lightning version. Although there is no final plan yet when Thunderbird 3.3 will be released, the ballpark figure is some time in April. This would mean we have something between 3 and 7 weeks to complete our next release.

If we continue our previous plan and release Lightning 1.0b3, which would work on Thunderbird 3.1 and 3.2, we would have just enough time to complete that release and would need a near to equal amount of time to prepare for a Thunderbird 3.3 compatible release. As you can imagine, this is not feasible.

Therefore we have decided to leave out 1.0b3 and concentrate on releasing 1.0b4, which will be compatible with Thunderbird 3.3.

For localizers, this means they will have to make sure l10n-central is correctly translated. Resulting l10n builds can be found here. Pike is working hard to make sure the l10n dashboard can keep up with our branch switching. As soon as he is done, we can officially announce string freeze and accept sign-offs. This of course doesn’t mean you need to wait. We have checked in all bugs that require string changes, so go ahead and translate!

For Seamonkey, this means that Lightning 1.0b4 will support Seamonkey 2.1, which is currently in its beta phase.

In turn, we no longer have a need for 1.0b3pre nightly builds. This might be unfortunate for Thunderbird 3.1 users that want to stay up to date with the latest Lightning features. On the other hand, the list of bugs to be fixed for the next beta doesn’t contain any more new features. We will concentrate on fixing bugs and regressions to make sure Lightning 1.0b4 doesn’t cause any surprises for your daily work.

Lightning — 11 comments
09
Feb 11

Lightning trunk is back on track!

For those of you using a Thunderbird 3.3 Alpha version or later, we have great news! I have finally managed to fix bug 591744, which was the last of the many bugs that had to be fixed to recover from the major changes to the mozilla-central platform.

If you would like to give it a try, you will need either a nightly or alpha version of Thunderbird, together with the nightly version of Lightning. You can get these using the following links:

Update: As noted in the comments below, the trunk versions of Lightning also work with the following beta versions of SeaMonkey:

* To avoid misunderstandings, even though it is named 1.1a1pre, this does not mean we have release 1.0 yet! Lightning on trunk (labeled 1.1a1pre) uses a different Mozilla platform than Lightning from the 1.9.2 branch (labeled 1.0b3pre). We have chosen differing version numbers to make that difference obvious.

Lightning — 5 comments
24
Jan 11

Lightning Mac/Linux 64 bit nightlys are here!

After a fair amount of duplicates (19 as of now!), we finally have the hardware set up so we can provide Linux 64 bit nightlys on Trunk. On a related note, we now provide mixed x86/mac64 nightlys for the Mac OSX Platform, in turn we have dropped support for PowerPC.

After Thunderbird started providing nightly 64 bit builds it was time to follow. Unfortunately, our Mac builder was a G5 with a PowerPC processor, which doesn’t support OSX 10.6. Thanks to Mozilla Messaging, we have now received a new mac and linux builder with 64 bit support.

Also I’d like to thank gozer from Mozilla Messaging for setting things up for us. Thanks to him, we now have the builders running comm-central (Thunderbird 3.3 Alpha compatible) builds.

You can get the new builds here, they are compatible with the current Thunderbird nightlys from comm-central:

If you are looking for Thunderbird 3.1.x compatible nightly builds, you can get them as usual from here.

Technical — Comments Off on Dear Link Spammers, you can stop spamming now!
04
Jan 11

Dear Link Spammers, you can stop spamming now!

Hello Folks,

Just a minor change, hopefully it works as expected! I have found out how to modify the blog to remove the URL field when commenting. Adding spam urls to the comment text will still cause the junk filter to react, so we should be safe.

I hope this will cut down the amount of spam on the calendar blog, if not immediately then maybe in the long run.

Project Updates — 4 comments
04
Jan 11

Happy New Year from the Calendar Website Team

Dear Calendar community,

2010 has been a great year for us all; we’ve come up with some nice
releases: Lightning 1.0b1 and 1.0b2. The developers have created lots of
stunning features and improved the application stability, performance and the
memory consumption. The second beta allows the users to print out the tasks and
to set different start and end timezones for events and tasks. The developers have
been working really hard to code all features and integrate Lightning seamlessly into
the Thunderbird user interface.

Our download numbers were stable and lots of users have downloaded our software.
During this year we were posting blog posts that contain some download
statistics. Users have downloaded almost three million copies of Lightning this year and we couldn’t be more happy with it.

2010 was a really successful year and we’ve done lots of things. In this year three new members joined the Calendar Website Team, to make the Calendar Project’s website even better and to update all users by posting updates on this blog. We didn’t just release new versions and updates, but we also had lots of l10n-related changes. In the last quarter we also migrated all Lightning support-articles to the Mozilla Messaging Knowledgebase.

We’d like to thank you and all other users for downloading our software and for reading the blog posts.

This year will be another great year for the Calendar community which in turn contributes to the success of the Mozilla community.
We have achived lots of goals and we’d like to thank all the developers, contributors and members of the community. We’d also like to thank you and all of the other users for downloading our software and for reading the blog posts.

We wish you, your family and your friends all the best for 2011.

–The Calendar Website Team
(Tobias Markus, Tom Ellins, Jan Bambach)

QA / Technical — 7 comments
19
Dec 10

Updating holiday calendars

We’re in a desperate need for updated holiday calendars, as many have not yet been updated for 2011.

In detail, we’re looking for calendars for the following countries / locales:

  • Basque
  • Belgium (Dutch)
  • Chile
  • Greece
  • Kazakhstan
  • Lebanon
  • Malta
  • Namibia
  • Puerto Rico
  • Singapore (Submitted, but not reviewed yet.)
  • Sri Lanka
  • Switzerland
  • Turkey (Submitted, but not reviewed yet.)

All of these local calendars will expire when they’re not updated and will have to be removed if we don’t find a contributor who can support them.

If you would like to help, please follow these steps:

Once complete, we can update the calendar file on the website as soon as possible.

Thanks in advance!

If you need further information about this process, don’t hesitate to contact us in the #calendar-website channel on irc.mozilla.org or calendar@mozilla-uk.org

–The calendar website team
(Tobias Markus, Tom Ellins, Jan Bambach)

Project Updates — 5 comments
10
Dec 10

Bringing your Calendar to the Web, Part 2: Consumers

I recently started a series on how to best bring your calendar data to the web. Today I’d like to go into more detail about who would be a consumer of your data, and how this could look like.

There are a few ideas (and even standards) on the web to make calendar data more readable for computers. The first that comes to mind is the hCalendar microformat, which uses the HTML class attribute to mark certain aspects of an event. Unfortunately, the use of this format is not very wide spread, mostly because browsers usually don’t make much sense of this information. The standard works well for sites promoting events to the user, such as local event sites. For example, Yahoo Upcoming uses the hCalendar format. There are also efforts to revive ical-as-xml, also called xCal. This is more centered on transporting calendar data via xml though.

But, as far as I have read, there is no standard for sharing local calendar data with the web. To start off in this direction, we have to differ between active and passive data consumers.

On the one hand there are websites that would ask the user for his or her calendar data so that they could display this data, well integrated into their site. For such sites it would be great to provide a standardized API to access user calendar data. On the other hand, there are sites that won’t use a such API right away. Such sites could nevertheless be integrated with your calendar. Parsing the website and looking for dates could help you in creating an event in your calendar.

Scraping events off a web page can be very complex and its not often clear which parts of the web page really are event data. While hCalendar could relieve this issue, for sites which don’t provide metadata a human is probably still the best to decide. I am working on an extension that allows manually scraping data from an email, this could well be extended to websites too.

Lets go back to web-based calendars for a moment. If you have been using an online calendar like Google Calendar, you have to rely on some sort of integration between those websites. Although some sites like tungle.me offer importing data from Google Calendar, this is not always the case. Also, what if you use a different Calendar? The site owner needs to add and test interfacing with each calendar site, which is not always easy.

The alternative would be a standard, that allows on-line calendars to synchronize its data with your PC, and also define a way for other sites to access this data in a safe manner. This would mean the usual add/modify/delete/retrieve operations, together with a synchronization mechanism. To make adoption as easy as possible, this standard should make use of existing formats and standards as possible. I could imagine xCal being the transport mechanism, together with etags and ctags to improve synchronization.

I will be talking about privacy in more detail in the next part of this series.

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