After a long history of using mozillazine.org, the blog is now moving to http://blog.mozilla.com/calendar. The new location contains the same archive of posts available here so we don't have to worry about losing history.

Please update your bookmarks and feeds. If you are using planet.mozillamessaging.com to read this, you obviously don't have to do anything.

I'd like to thank everyone at mozillazine.org for kindly providing the blog hosting over the years. Also I'd like to thank everyone who has subscribed and I hope to see you at the new location!

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 12:14 AM | Permalink

Due to a critical issue that some Windows XP users are experiencing, we have decided to release Lightning 1.1.1, an intermediate release compatible with Thunderbird 9/Seamonkey 2.6. We recommend all users to upgrade, especially those who cannot see their calendar data and are getting an error console message "Failed to load native module at path ...\calbasecomps.dll".

You can get the builds on addons.mozilla.org, as always.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 3:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's been over a year since we last posted about the current state of Lightning usage. Since that day Thunderbird 5, 6, 7 and 8 have been released with their Lightning counterparts 1.0 beta4, 1.0 beta 5, 1.0 beta7 and finally Lightning 1.0.

Now it's time to look at things again and I'm happy to report, that Lightning is more popular as ever before with nearly 30% more daily users than one year before. Right now we average nearly 1,400,000 users each day during the workweek and about 775,000 users on the weekends, which brings to more than 1,200,000 users on average over the course of a week.

Most of our users (64.2%) are now on Thunderbird 8. Most of the rest still uses Thunderbird 3.1 (15.0%) and Thunderbird 7 (13.4%). The remainder (7.4%) is mostly distributed to Thunderbird 2 (still at 2.3%), Thunderbird 6 (2.6%), Thunderbird 5 (1.0%) and other installations (other Thunderbird releases, SeaMonkey and Firefox) at 1.5%.

Posted by Simon Paquet at 5:34 AM | Permalink

So, this is it! My early birthday present, Lightning 1.0, has finally been released. For quite some time now we have had so-called "beta" releases, that were in no way different to our other releases. With Lightning 1.0 we can finally say good bye to the betas and hello to exciting new releases!

When planning for this release, we mainly focused on rounding off any sharp edges you may find in Lightning. Just as an example, you can now press Escape to cancel creating an event via dragging. Sounds like a simple, intuitive feature that should have been there all along? You bet! There is one exception though, Lightning now supports full offline editing using the cache feature you can find in the calendar properties. This great big feature has been in the works during the past Google Summer of Code and has now finally made it into the release.

As always, you can get the latest release from addons.mozilla.org. If you are using the Provider for Google Calendar, make sure to upgrade too. Please note that Lightning 1.0 is compatible to Thunderbird 8, which is also being released today.

So, whats happening next? I will be gathering some ideas during the upcoming EU MozCamp 2011 and will present you my plans shortly after. If you have any suggestions, please do use the newsgroups to get in touch.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

I'd like to present you with Lightning 1.0rc2. You can find it at its new location on the addons.mozilla.org beta channel (If you still get 1.0rc1, then please try again in a few hours when the page cache has been updated).

There is a big new feature in this release which needs your testing. Thanks to the hard work of Mohit, who has joined us through the recent Google Summer of Code, we have extended the cache with full offline support, which means you can write your events while in offline mode. If you are using a CalDAV calendar, it will even retry events that failed.

If you encounter any issues, please file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org.

Note, if you are using the cache with the Provider for Google Calendar, please stay tuned. I will soon post a development version of the provider containing a patch that corrects offline support.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Plans for the next release

Its about time to give you an update on what is planned for the next release. As you may have noticed, we have had a lot of trouble calling our releases "beta". For one thing, some users and especially corporate users are cautious when they read beta and don't see that it has the same quality as all our other releases. Aside from that we also had trouble with uploading releases to addons.mozilla.org (they are automatically marked beta and require admin intervention to make them public for everyone) and we are constantly in need of new sub-version numbers. For example, if we want to release a matching build for Thunderbird 7.0b2, what do we call it? Lightning 1.0 beta 7 beta 1? Thats too much, do you agree?

To relieve that issue we're going to bite the bullet and call either our next release or the one after 1.0. Afterwards we can newly decide on version numbers and I'll tell you one thing: I'm not going to go into the version number trap again. If at some point the next available version number is 2.0, then that's the way it is.

What this means for Localizers?

We have taken great care to avoid patches with string changes for the next release. Therefore as it is right now, if you have all strings translated for Lightning 1.0b5, then you are good to go for the next release.

According to the l10n dashboard, there are 13 locales with missing strings. This information is quite old so a lot may have changed in between, but it would be splendid if all of the remaining locales could have their strings translated. I will be contacting the localizers personally to make sure things progress

Update: Likely the l10n builds are not working yet. I'll also post here and in mozilla.dev.l10n when that is fixed!

What this means for you?

For you? Yes, for you! We need help testing Lightning to make sure there are no unpleasant surprises in the next two weeks. Now you'll surely want to know where to get a build compatible with Thunderbird 7.0 Betas. Unfortunately I must admit, this is not quite ready yet. Our goal is to automate the release process a bit more, otherwise at least a day of my time is taken just for producing a full set of release (candidate) builds. It may easily happen that a detail is forgotten, which will only make the process more painful.

So what to do in the meantime? Well you have two options. First of all you could test Thunderbird 8 Prerelease with Lightning 1.0b8pre. This may be a different Thunderbird version, but the Lightning code is the same between those versions.

Then we have the first set of test builds for Thunderbird 7 beta and Lightning 1.0b7. These builds might have their quirks since not all parts of release automation went well. Please stay tuned, I'll be posting an update when its advisable to move from testing with Thunderbird 8 to Thunderbird 7.

Conclusion

We need you now more than ever to make sure Lightning 1.0 is a success. This version will likely get more PR than the previous versions so it would be a pity if it weren't in good shape or needs to be skipped for an urgent fix. I'm counting on you!

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 1:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Unfortunately, some major errors slipped through in 1.0b4. You might have noticed the alarm window disappearing and a lot of misplaced beeps from the alarm system. You might have also noticed, that some of your calendars are no longer working (specifically, webcal:// calendars).

To fix these issues we are releasing 1.0b5 in the next 1-2 days, which contains 10 bugfixes.

As another highlight, 1.0b5 will now be compatible with both Thunderbird 5 and Thunderbird 6 to ensure you can continue using Lightning without extra hassle. If you are using Thunderbird 6.0b1 it would be great if you could give these test builds a spin.

Update: Another issue slipped in, I've modified the packages to fix it. If you have already downloaded, please try the following links!

You can get the builds here. If you get a 404, its likely they have not been propagated to all mirrors yet, check back in a few hours.

• Windows (32 bit): http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b5rc3/win32/
• Mac OSX (32/64 bit) http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b5rc3/mac/
• Linux (32/64 bit): http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/1.0b5rc3/linux/

If you are using the Provider for Google Calendar, I have marked the current version compatible with Thunderbird 6. You can get it as usual from addons.mozilla.org

Thank you for your support!

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (36)

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!

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

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.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 2:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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)

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In a recent blog post, some rumors have emerged. Partially this is due to bad wording on our side, so I'd like to straighten things out here.

• "Since we never leave our users with one outdated version of Sunbird, we always give Sunbird new updates with new cool features and bugfixes." - This is plain wrong, we are not actively working on Sunbird. Nevertheless, due to a shared codebase between Sunbird and Lightning, users who build Sunbird on their own might still profit from some changes. The sentence was corrected in the original blog post.
• Philipp writes all the blog posts here - Nope, please take a close look at the Author. We now have great support from Jan, Tobbi, and TMZ. I unfortunately don't get notified about comments on blog posts I don't write, so I didn't have a chance to answer via comment. Sorry about that!
• The latest version of Sunbird is 1.0 beta 2 - Although the folder structure on the ftp server might suggest this, the latest version of Sunbird is still 1.0b1. The naming of that folder is merely an artifact of the release automation used for Lightning 1.0b2. There were no Sunbird builds produced and promoted during that Lightning release.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Lately, I've been exploring some new ideas on how to attract new users and maybe also developers. There are many people out there that prefer using a web-based calendar, which is fine, but I believe they can find added value by storing their data locally.

Surfing the web, you probably make a lot of contact with calendar related websites. The most obvious is a web-based calendar like Google or Yahoo Calendar. But there is actually a lot more. Have you ever used a short-term scheduling service like doodle.de or tungle.me ? Or to go one step further, you've surely visited a site that contains a massive amount of calendar data, for example local event sites like eventful.com or upcoming.yahoo.com.

So what happens when you visit a scheduling site? You've probably been invited to participate by a friend. So you look at the site to see what times are suggested. Then you switch back to your calendar to see if you have time. Then you switch back to the site and after a few clicks you have set up your availability. But then you forgot to check for the next week. You see whats going on here? You are switching back and forwards, wasting a lot of time. If you could allow the site to access your calendar, you could see all the data in one place, no need for switching to your calendar application or website. The same goes for upcoming events. If you're looking for a nice concert to go to, it would be swell to know if you are free on those days.

This post is the start of a series, I will be posting more about this topic soon. Next up I will be writing in more detail about the possible consumers of your calendar data. Please stay tuned, you are welcome to leave your feedback and ideas.

Posted by Philipp Kewisch at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)