lilmatt's blog

Clint Talbert (ctalbert) of SimDesk and I, with some help from one of Dave Humphrey's Seneca students, Eva Or, have been working intensely on improving iTIP/iMIP support in Lightning. In non-acronym speak, this means adding support for accepting and declining calendar event invitations sent to you via email.

Lightning 0.3 added a feature where incoming event invitations would be displayed as such and could be added to your default calendar. This work expands on that feature by sending your response, such as "accept" or "decline", to the person who invited you (the "organizer").

As of this writing, we are correctly recognizing invitations sent to us from Apple's iCal.app, and sending back a reply iCal.app can parse. This is represented in iCal.app by the green checkmark icon shown next to "lilmatt@pixel...". We'll soon be testing it against Outlook.

With any luck, we'll be submitting it for review in the next week or two. The progress can be tracked in bug 334685.

The Mozilla Calendar Project today released the latest versions of their flagship software, Mozilla Sunbird and Lightning 0.3.1. This is a maintenance release containing the recent changes to Daylight Savings Time in various countries around the world, and is recommended for users of all previous Mozilla Calendar software. No additional features were included, although a select number of stability issues were addressed. Work continues on Sunbird and Lightning 0.5, the next planned release.

Download Sunbird and Lightning 0.3.1 from the project's website.

With the landing of bug 373380, Lightning will now attempt to send invitations to any attendees you may have added to the attendee list of your event. These invitations have been tested with the latest versions of iCal.app and Outlook. We'll be testing with Zimbra soon. This functionality will be in the upcoming 0.5 release.

While we don't currently handle the reply you get back, other than as if it were just a normal email message, support to do so is already written into Sun's prototype event dialog, which we hope to migrate to fairly soon, most likely after 0.5 ships.

Following up on my previous post, initial testing with Zimbra appears to be successful. After accepting, the event is added to my Zimbra calendar (even at the correct time!).

For the last eight months I have been fortunate enough to have my work on Calendar funded by the Mozilla Corporation. During this time we've had two releases of both Sunbird and Lightning (0.3 and 0.3.1), and are on the cusp of a third (0.5). We have added tinderbox builds for our localizers, delivery of nightly builds to our testers (via AUS), crash reporting support to Sunbird, iTIP/iMIP invitation support to Lightning, read/write support for Google Calendar (via an extension), and improved CalDAV support, and have developed a community of regular contributors and testers. I am proud to have helped steward the Calendar project these past eight months and to have directly contributed to many of the above accomplishments.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and so my MoCo contract ends Saturday, March 31. On Monday, April 2, I begin working for Flock, the "social web browser" based on Firefox. I will continue to contribute to the Calendar project, and will continue driving the Sunbird/Lightning 0.5 release as much as I can, however I'll no longer be all-Calendar, all-the-time. At Flock, I want to push some of their work on the core of Mozilla back into Mozilla-proper, so that we all can benefit. I feel so lucky to have found work where I can continue to hack on Mozilla stuff full-time.

I'll be in Mountain View all of next week for indoctrination, and I hope to see folks for lunch, dinner, hockey or what have you. Working with everyone at MoCo has been a wonderful experience, and I deeply appreciate the opportunities I've had these past few months.