Calendar Weblog

Only three days after the last status update, it's already time for another as the developers have fixed lots of bugs (19) in the last three days.

The most notable fixes are in the area of iMIP/iTIP (sending and receiving e-mail invites) with the fixes for bug 377761 (better compatibility with earlier Outlook releases) and bug 429938 (support for meeting cancellation).

Here's the list of all the 19 changes within the last three days:

• Bug 202360:
  Color Coding of Tasks and Events (multiple classification)
• Bug 322979:
  Views should not scroll the labelling columns along the non-scrolling axis
• Bug 368976:
  Cannot undefine alarm for an exception
• Bug 377761:
  Outlook 200x does not recognize iTIP/iMIP invitation because of MIME type issues
• Bug 397896:
  Sync default snooze between Sunbird and Lightning
• Bug 397913:
  Add tooltips to the miniday buttons
• Bug 401693:
  Today pane not updated on Mac OS X after hibernation
• Bug 426746:
  Consolidate startup code
• Bug 427006:
  Timezone offset incorrectly calculated for negative half hour timezones
• Bug 428715:
  Between 23:00 and 00:00, the default event start date is 00:00 of the next day
• Bug 429938:
  No cancel message is send to attendees if event is deleted
• Bug 430254:
  Add interfaces to GData for UI code
• Bug 430805:
  Permit to change the default free/busy attribute policy for all-day events
• Bug 431829:
  Moving Today Pane button on Task toolbar removes it from Calendar toolbar
• Bug 432218:
  Remove TB 1.5 specific code in getMailBar() function
• Bug 432499:
  Duplicate id in calendar.xul
• Bug 432703:
  Changing month with scroll wheel throws error
• Bug 432793:
  Get rid of "move" transaction type
• Bug 432794:
  Allow loading chrome scripts in test cases

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

Posted by Simon Paquet at 4:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I apologize for the long delay between status updates. It is certainly not due to a low number of bugfixes in recent day. In fact quite a large number of bugs (32) have been fixed within the last 18 days, showing that the developers have been quite active.

Three bugs are particular worth mentioning:

• Bug 377753: Look and Feel of minimonths should be adapted
  The small monthly overview in the upper left corner has gotten a visual overhaul and is looking much better now in our opinion. Thanks go to Berend for implementing this and to Philipp and Christian for reviewing the changes.
• Bug 389150: Display Today Pane with Task List in Calendar mode
  A lot of people have asked us to enable the today pane in Lightning's calendar mode, so that people get a quick overview over their upcoming events and tasks as well. Thanks go to Berend for implementing this and to Philipp and Christian for reviewing the changes.
• Bug 430430: Consolidate context menus
  Users of Sunbird have long complained about the inadequacy of the context menu in Lightning, e.g. when right-clicking on an event in the views. Now the full glory of the Sunbird context menus is available in Lightning as well. Thanks go to Philipp for implementing this and to Berend and Christian for reviewing the changes.

Here's the list of all the 32 changes within the last 18 days:

• Bug 340752:
  Undefined variable error in Makefile from using autoconf syntax for sed replacements
• Bug 377753:
  Look and Feel of minimonths should be adapted
• Bug 389150:
  Display Today Pane with Task List in Calendar mode too
• Bug 390194:
  Event/Recurrence dialog: Width is too small for three minimonths
• Bug 392855:
  'Show Today Pane' button not available with fresh profile
• Bug 395928:
  Unify wording in event dialog by renaming Importance to Priority
• Bug 400278:
  CalDAV provider issues requests to unselected caldav accounts at startup
• Bug 410898:
  DTSTART/DTEND ignored in FREEBUSY response to scheduling request
• Bug 413265:
  Some timezones not mapped correctly (both remaining patches)
• Bug 414565:
  Show relative date string in alarms for tomorrow's events
• Bug 414932:
  Change string name imipHtml.Comment to imipHtml.comment
• Bug 417020:
  UTC and floating are missing in time zone picker
• Bug 417539:
  Remove obsolete event dialog files and strings
• Bug 417629:
  Import ICS file to CalDAV server fails to handle recurrence-id correctly
• Bug 418414:
  Remove obsolete Jan Mayen references
• Bug 428392:
  Accepting Events not adding event to calender - falsely reporting "not an attendee"
• Bug 428851:
  Accepting Meeting Invites Does Not Update Google Calendar
• Bug 429061:
  webcals scheme not supported (i.e., for https)
• Bug 429497:
  Warning and error nsIInterfaceRequestor in the error console
• Bug 429908:
  Minimonth broken on Trunk
• Bug 429911:
  Year Popup in minimonth doesn't listen to scrollwheel
• Bug 429912:
  Packaging cleanup for crashreporter.xpt
• Bug 429927:
  Remove outdated comment from calendar/base/jar.mn
• Bug 430062:
  Remove some 1.8.0 branch specific code from calManager
• Bug 430249:
  Storage calendar sends out too many onOperationCompletes
• Bug 430280:
  bad aOperationType on addItem
• Bug 430430:
  Consolidate context menus
• Bug 431031:
  Remove files from resources/content/converters directory
• Bug 431041:
  Correct tooltip for Print toolbarbutton
• Bug 431395:
  Remove ununsed files from /calendar/resources/content/
• Bug 431732:
  Use the createEventFromIcalString helper in unit tests
• Bug 431733:
  Remove unused images from /calendar/resources/skins/classic

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

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Two weeks ago, we had a great face-2-face meeting, which only now I am able to post about. Among the many interesting talks and discussions particular question we've discussed was "How do we proceed with Thunderbird 3 and trunk?". I'll try to sum up the outcome of this discussion here.

There are a ton of good reasons to move on to the trunk ASAP and help Thunderbird 3 get into shape: calendar will be a core feature of it, trunk has a couple of platform improvements that make our live easier and it will lessen the load on developers and localizers, that we no longer have to think about both the 1.8 branch and the trunk.

On the other hand, we have existing users on Thunderbird 2 waiting for fixes and features. Looking at our resource situation, it was pretty clear to everyone that we can't support and develop both branch and trunk longer term in a reasonable fashion. So where and when do we make the cut?

We've agreed to do one further release on branch in the coming 4 months, namely 0.9. We will focus on the following topics:

• Usability (our UI gurus have a lot of ideas here)
Performance (we will put more focus on improving our story with large remote calendars)Interoperability (better iMIP/iTIP support comes to my mind here)

More details can be found on http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning09.

We hope that this release will be sufficient to be used for a longer period of time until the next Thunderbird releaseis out. There will definitely be usable betas (perhaps even alphas) of Thunderbird with integrated calendar, but we also know that some users reject to use those and stay on Thunderbird 2.

We had some further discussion about whether the naming of this last branch release shouldn't be 1.0, rounding up our development for Thunderbird 2. This seems obvious from a marketing POV, but doesn't fit into the mozilla way of promoting major releases. So we agreed that we have a thorough look at what we've reached both w.r.t. features and quality when 0.9 is almost done, postponing that decision.

To answer some obvious questions:

• Does this imply changes on Sunbird's development?
  No, we will do parallel releases of Sunbird with the Lightning releases. So Sunbird 0.9 will come out at the same time as Lightning 0.9 and we'll move Sunbird development over to the trunk after that, too. This means we will be doing a Sunbird 1.0 release in parallel to the Thunderbird 3 release.
• What happens if Thunderbird 3 gets delayed?
  We certainly do not hope that this will be the case, but we can react flexibly to that. This means that we might put out another release between 0.9 and TB3 (probably called something like 0.9.5) if it turns out that TB3 will take significantly longer (more than 3-4 months) than anticipated.
• When are you planning to release 0.9? What is the release date of TB3?
  We are currently planning to release Lightning and Sunbird 0.9 in August 2008. As with all release dates, this release date is subject to change, if it turns out that we need additional time to put out a great release.
  TB3 is currently slated for December 2008/early 2009. The same caveats as said above apply here.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 5:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

It's been nearly a month since my last status update and nearly two weeks since 0.8 was released, so I guess it's time to show you what we've been working on in the last days. Since 0.8 came out, we've already fixed 29 bugs. So grab yourself a nightly and help us test those fixes.

On a sidenote: Many of the calendar developers will meet in Hamburg (Germany) to discuss future plans, meet up with some of the Thunderbird developers to discuss the future integration of Lightning into Thunderbird and perhaps also do some hacking. We're hoping that this will strengthen the team spirit and give us a better vision of what we wanna do with 0.9, 1.0 and onwards.

Here's the list of bugs fixed since 0.8 was released:

• Bug 368865:
  REG_APP_DESC should be removed from the Calendar 1.8 branch
• Bug 393769:
  Mouseover tooltips aren't shown on trunk
• Bug 393998:
  Next button in new calendar dialog is disabled when changes are cancelled
• Bug 396075:
  'New Calendar' dialog: sentences should get punctuation marks
• Bug 399599:
  Help menu has no accesskey for item Contents
• Bug 402482:
  No scroll-bar for all-day events
• Bug 402593:
  Sunbird lacks Ctrl+Q to exit
• Bug 410755:
  Impossible to resize and reorder the columns of the task list on trunk
• Bug 413333:
  Offer auto-conversion of google ICS calendars to writable Google Calendars
• Bug 413523:
  No icon images are shown in the Customize Toolbar dialog on trunk
• Bug 418058:
  Add tooltip to close button in unifinder
• Bug 419184:
  "msgHeaderParser is not defined" when dragging mail to Calendar item
• Bug 421307:
  Synchronize FilterOptions with FilterOptions in task mode Menu
• Bug 422369:
  Make Calendar styles LTR (left-to-right) and RTL (right-to-left) agnostic
• Bug 422630:
  Fix groupbox theme regression caused by bug 421814
• Bug 422640:
  Enable view menu-items
• Bug 423503:
  Memory leaks in lightning
• Bug 424808:
  Use binary search to make addItem in month view scale better
• Bug 426140:
  Wrong sort order for priority
• Bug 426759:
  Create calIAlarm interface
• Bug 427216:
  Make tools menu popup match other applications
• Bug 427237:
  cvs remove unused files in Sunbird themes
• Bug 427458:
  Completed task time is shown in UTC and not in local time
• Bug 428798:
  Remove obsolete CSS rules .next-button:hover:active and .prev-button:hover:active
• Bug 428922:
  Remove even more obsolete CSS rules
• Bug 428933:
  Consolidate view-specific CSS rules
• Bug 429095:
  Recurrences with no end date should be limited to a maximum of 60 instances
• Bug 429101:
  Missing styling on navigation buttons in main calendar view
• Bug 429313:
  Open the invitation dialog when the counter is 'Zero' -> error console output

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

Posted by Simon Paquet at 7:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Since the release of 0.8 many people have asked for builds on additional platforms and we're happy to comply as our community has supplied us with builds for Linux x86-64, Solaris (Intel), Solaris (SPARC) and OS/2.

Here are the links:

• Lightning 0.8:
  • Linux x86-64
  • OS/2
  • Solaris (Intel)
  • Solaris (SPARC)
• Sunbird 0.8:
  • Linux x86-64
  • OS/2
  • Solaris (Intel)
  • Solaris (SPARC)

Many thanks to Philipp Kewisch for the Linux x86-64 builds, to Sun Microsystems for the Solaris builds and to Walter Meinl and Peter Weilbacher for the OS/2 builds. Enjoy!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 4:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)