Calendar Weblog

Posted by Clint Talbert at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The former prototype event dialog has been promoted to be the new standard event and task dialog for Lightning and Sunbird. The developers are interested in feedback and bug reports of the test community to improve the new dialog. Also, the new Lighting "today pane" has landed, and we need your help testing it and the mail/calendar switch.

You can find all the information on our Test Day wiki page. We look forward to seeing you in #calendar-qa and Litmus on Tuesday, July 31st.

Happy Testing!

Posted by Clint Talbert at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Hi guys,
another two weeks has gone by and I want to keep you informed about the latest new stuff that is going into the tree. No very notable fixes in the last two weeks, so I will move straight ahead to the list of fixed bugs.

Here's the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

• Bug 351745:
  iMIP bar should ask user what calendar to add invitation to
• Bug 374566:
  CalDAV provider should provide UI when setting calendar read-only
• Bug 378588:
  Tasks-in-view is broken on CalDAV calendars
• Bug 380376:
  removed calendarToReturn
• Bug 385439:
  wcap calendar in read only mode -> but new event creation is possible
• Bug 385572:
  sunbird.exe is compiled with incorrect Product Version information
• Bug 385900:
  implement todaypane
• Bug 386502:
  dtstart is always included in recurrence set, even when it's out of the query range
• Bug 386528:
  Update credits list to include some more people
• Bug 387302:
  About dialog has no accesskey
• Bug 387891:
  Remove tasks icon from mode toolbar until task view is implemented
• Bug 388007:
  PROPFIND truncates URL parameters
• Bug 388016:
  Mode Toolbar: Visual Fine Tuning
• Bug 388221:
  Repeating events - alarm doesn't always fire
• Bug 388405:
  Change weekview to 'workweek days only' -> weekview gets unusable (Regression)
• Bug 388566:
  Set a minimum width for calendar and mode toolbar icons
• Bug 388735:
  GData Provider creates events off by one hour for timezones with fractional offsets

A huge 'Thanks' goes out to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Also, several user interface improvements have landed in Lightning, including the new mail/calendar switch and the "today pane". Join us to check out the new features and find any regressions these massive landings have caused.

As usual you can find all the information on our Test Day wiki page. We look forward to seeing you in #calendar-qa and/or Litmus on Tuesday.

Happy Testing!

Posted by Clint Talbert at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

• ICS/WebDav: It seems that most of these problems stemmed from incompatible Limit/LimitExcept statements and a change to our code base that causes writes to fail if authentication is required for PUTs but not GETs. This is best summed up in bug 387559
• ICS/WebDav and CalDav: There are also proxy issues affecting both clients for these server types. The proxy configuration seems to have been recently broken, with various reports stating that it worked in 0.3.1 and that it did not work in 0.3.1. We need further clarification on this issue. This issue is summed up in bug 373439

We were able to track down the first issue to a specific check-in, and that is now being investigated. However, we need to do the same with the proxy issue. If you have a proxy configuration please try out various Lightning nightly builds and see if you can determine the build where the proxy configuration stopped working.

Things We Could Use Help With

• Determine the date the proxy configuration stopped working as mentioned above.
• Look at the list of these new remote calendar bugs, and see if we can duplicate some against others (leave us comments in the bug about your ideas).
• Give us suggestions on how we can improve calendar QA

Thanks very much to everyone that turned out for the test day. And congratulations to Alan Schwartz who won the prize for most creative test.

Happy Testing!!

Posted by Clint Talbert at 5:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Hi guys,
another week has gone by and I want to keep you informed about the latest new stuff that is going into the tree. The most notable fix in the last week was the fix for bug 376086, which introduces the multiweek view into Lightning, that all Sunbird users have already known for a long time. The only known limitation at the moment is, that you can only set the number of weeks that should be shown via the preferences dialog. Please help us in testing this and all the other stuff that has gone in lately.

Here's the list of fixed bugs since the last status update:

• Bug 262811:
  When hovering a ToDo item long lines of the description doesn't break into multiple lines
• Bug 332193:
  agenda shows past and finished tasks
• Bug 364672:
  Minimonth - Chinese weekday names indistinguishable
• Bug 369689:
  In day and week views, events ending at midnight cannot be resized to a smaller size using the mouse
• Bug 373898:
  Rounding issues for grid boxes in calendar multiday view
• Bug 376086:
  Lightning does not support a multiweek view
• Bug 382755:
  Lightning fails to process iTIP/iMIP invitations sent by Groupwise server
• Bug 383991:
  Full SSL support for (Google) Calendars
• Bug 386483:
  Allday event marks two days bold in minimonth
• Bug 386505:
  can't switch to calendar mode using Thunderbird 1.5
• Bug 387294:
  width of left pane is not set properly at startup
• Bug 387549:
  bad lineends in sources files

A huge 'Thanks' goes out to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This test day is going to be different because we're encouraging everyone to get creative with their testing. See if you can help us find out why these events are disappearing. Take a look at Litmus, and see what we tested there, then think about ways to go beyond that. On Tuesday, we'll be giving an award for the most creative and effective test, so be sure to add your test to the Test Day Wiki page.

We've been doing a great job as a QA team, but I think this issue gives us an opportunity to think about how we can improve the quality of Lightning and Sunbird. I don't believe that the only solution is to quit our day jobs and work on this around the clock (although that might work).

I think we can find ways to work smarter, to do more with the time and the people we have. Maybe we should look into automating some of the testing. Maybe we should look at the weak parts of our Litmus test suite and fix those areas. Maybe we need to delve deeper into performance and memory leak profiling.

We have started this wiki page for brainstorming ways to improve every aspect of calendar QA. We're going to take your ideas, prioritize them based on what we need the most before 0.7 and put them onto our revised Calendar QA ToDo list.

We will see you on Tuesday. Get creative, bring us your best tests, and prepare to discover where all those events have gone.

Posted by Clint Talbert at 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Hi guys,
after the 0.5 release we're not stopping, but are moving full-speed towards the 0.7 release later this year. Already over 30 bugs have been fixed since the 0.5 release came out. The most notable fix was of course the fix for bug 371916 (see a description here). With all the new stuff going in, it would be great if you could help us test all the new features on the next testday, which we'll announce shortly.

Here's the list of fixed bugs since the 0.5 release:

• Bug 259234:
  event start time is greater than end time if negative default duration
• Bug 264150:
  Minimonth busy highlight
• Bug 327974:
  schema-*.sql has fallen out of sync with the provider
• Bug 334264:
  text color in about dialog is not default color
• Bug 346762:
  Lightning shouldn't include applicationUtils.js
• Bug 350323:
  show hidden calendars when they are selected
• Bug 352433:
  'all-day' is shown on 'print' view and printed product for an event selected 'allday'
• Bug 355731:
  Unable to resize left pane below certain width
• Bug 364381:
  Give minimonth years a scrolling feature
• Bug 364572:
  unable to resize the transparent overlay in free/busy grid
• Bug 369848:
  Full weekday name in multiday views
• Bug 371916:
  switch between mail and calendar view
• Bug 372868:
  Schema out-of-date error check forces Thunderbird to quit, so you can't disable Lightning
• Bug 373004:
  all-day option doesn't affect free/busy transparency correctly
• Bug 373888:
  code cleanup: use viewElem property in decorated views
• Bug 376496:
  forcing default timezone for print formatting
• Bug 377401:
  always 3 minimonths in recurrence dialog
• Bug 377463:
  Scrollbar appears / disappears in week & day view when dragging event past 12pm
• Bug 377486:
  Remove unused feedProcessor.js file from Sunbird
• Bug 377554:
  Reduce download size by compressing PNG images
• Bug 381415:
  RDATE/EXDATE list is not considered
• Bug 382705:
  Status label in New Task window is misaligned
• Bug 383462:
  fallback to DUE if no DTSTART is present
• Bug 383860:
  event dialog: importance label is not localizable
• Bug 385341:
  Add ka (Georgian) to Calendar locales
• Bug 386195:
  Bump version number for Sunbird and Lightning nightly builds after release
• Bug 386336:
  Get rid of strict warnings
• Bug 386350:
  Sunbird fails to open several dialogs
• Bug 386430:
  dtd entity names should be changed to match their meaning
• Bug 386481:
  the view in mini calendar is not refreshed after subscribing to remote calendar
• Bug 386556:
  add missing ids
• Bug 386639:
  All day event dates are not displayed due to missing entity

A huge 'Thanks' goes out to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Simon Paquet at 1:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Hi guys,
first of all thanks for the massive feedback on our 0.5 release here on the blog, in the forums, newsgroups and on various websites like mozillazine or slashdot. We really appreciate every feedback that we get.

But today I don't want to talk about the past, but about what's coming next. A lot of thought has gone into improving the ease-of-use of our application. In the past people have voiced various issues that should be addressed:

• If you had a long folder-list, the Lightning agenda would cut off some of the folders and you had to do a lot of scrolling
• There were issues, were you could delete a mail, if you had both a mail and a task selected and wanted to delete only the task
• Lightning was only really compatible with the "Classic View" layout of Thunderbird. We did not really support the "Wide View" and the "Vertical View" layout
• Using other popular extensions like the Contacts Sidebar together with Lightning was a real pain

All of these issues have now been fixed with the patch for bug 371916 going in yesterday. With this patch we separate the mail- and calendar-related functionalities. You can now switch between mail-mode and calendar-mode with an easily accessible toolbar below or on top of your Thunderbird folder list.

Here are two screenshots of the new mail-mode and calendar-mode in action:

Here are some of the major features of this new functionality:

• The mode swithcing toolbar can be configured to appear at the bottom (default) or at the top of the Thunderbird folder list
• The different modes are offering different toolbars. You can now configure your toolbar in calendar-mode separately from the toolbar in mail-mode
• The different toolbars are context-sensitive. So the calendar-mode toolbar only offers calendar-related icons, while the toolbar in mail-mode only offers mail-related icons

As you would expect there are also some areas needing improvements, which we will add in due time:

• The state of the calendar view is currently not remembered once you close Thunderbird. It will always startup in week view. This is currently being worked on.
• We currently lack the ability to drang and drop mails on the calendar icons or to drag and drop an event on the mail icon. This is currently being worked on.
• The mode switching toolbar offers a task icon, which you can add to the toolbar, but clicking on it has no effect. We're currently working on a separate task view, which you can switch to once it has been finished.

A big thanks goes out to Mickey, who implemented this. I've been running a private build with his patch for over a month now and can tell you, that this feature seriously rocks! Stay with us! More good things are yet to come...

Posted by Simon Paquet at 3:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (50)