Mozilla Sunbird Application Revival

[jonah...@gmail.com]

I'm working on reviving the Sunbird application and making it new and improved! Any developers and coding experts and anyone who worked on Sunbird in the past please shoot me an email if you'd be interested. We're going to work on improving user interface and personalization as well as speed, accuracy, and everything that makes Firefox and Thunderbird so popular. Also, if anyone has the coding for the last installment of Sunbird who could send me a copy that I can work on to start tinkering with it, send me an email as well. I believe we can make Sunbird the amazing program it set out to be!
jonah...@gmail.com

[Mark Banner]

On 18/10/2012 22:34, jonah...@gmail.com wrote:
> I'm working on reviving the Sunbird application and making it new and
> improved! Any developers and coding experts and anyone who worked on
> Sunbird in the past please shoot me an email if you'd be interested.
> We're going to work on improving user interface and personalization as
> well as speed, accuracy, and everything that makes Firefox and
> Thunderbird so popular.

Rather than reviving Sunbird as-is, why not try things a little differently?

One of the problems with Sunbird and Lightning together was the
duplication of the UI code and maintaining both together.

Thunderbird is able to cope with tabs now, with a bit of work, I think
you could could tweak Thunderbird and Lightning so that you could have a
mode where Lightning was the default and you could effectively hide all
the mail functions (unless the user wanted them).

I think there's a few advantages that makes it worth doing; you wouldn't
need two UIs, if/when Lightning becomes non-binary you wouldn't be
needing to compile anything, you'd have the capability to do SMTP for
invites if you wanted it etc.

There are obviously some disadvantages, like having to load the
Thunderbird binaries, but I think that's outweighed by the advantages
you get in development.

Mark

[Jonah Karau]

All excellent points. I've been looking into all these and I look at it and got the idea - why not combine different aspects from Firefox, Thunderbird, and Lightning? The idea has crossed my mind to make the ability to hide mail function from Lighting/Thunderbird, but user ease was my biggest concern. The standalone idea of Sunbird is what I enjoy the most because you won't necessarily need all the same prerequisites that other applications do - the biggest being internet connection. Just using the previous version of Sunbird as a template is my primary idea, because the last setup it had was very decent, although worth changing.

UI's and binary-vs-non is also the concern I've had - the non-compilation factor is a plus.

Thanks Mark!
[To anyone] Any ideas/resources are appreciated!

[Philipp Kewisch]

Hey Jonah,

I'm happy to hear you'd like to put energy into getting back something
like Sunbird. I generally agree to Mark, I think it would make more
sense to join forces, as there would be lots of benefit for Lightning
too. The more people work on the Calendar Project in general the greater
options we can provide to the user.

The one big concern I have with starting a new version of Sunbird is one
that has happened in the past even with a team of full time developers
on the project: Feature divergence. What happens if there is a new
Lightning feature? Given we have discontinued Sunbird, I would not
require a new developer or current Lightning community developer to make
it compatible to the Sunbird port. This means you will be running after
Lightning to port the features, just as Lightning is running after
Thunderbird and the Mozilla Platform in general. Managing a such project
is a full time job, please don't underestimate that.

Mark's suggestion is actually one I have been dreaming of for some time.
If you follow this incentive, it will be much easier to manage. You can
get started with the project quite easily and work on bugs that benefit
an integration between Lightning and Thunderbird so that the Mail
features are not visible if there is no mail account. Here is a quote
from one of our blog posts:

"""
A vision we have come up with and other users have also brought up is to
make Lightning modify Thunderbird so far that starting from a new
profile gives you the option of either a calendar or mail account (or
both). If you choose Calendar, then you will be presented with only
calendar relevant UI (i.e similar to what Sunbird is today). You will
not be bothered with mail features unless you need them (i.e you want to
invite attendees and send invitations to them). This would have the
benefit of shared features like the address book being available without
much extra work.
"""

This fits the "user ease" requirement, since the user will only be asked
for an account at the beginning and will not have to cope with
Thunderbird's accounts until a feature is requested that requires Email
features.

Even with Today's state I think there are no hard requirements. An
Internet connection is not needed if you just create an Empty Mail &
blogs account (this is a requirement that could probably be removed by
fixing a bug or two) and use the local calendar account.

Regarding the UI template, here is another quote from that blog post. I
think that a standalone Calendar needs a bit more than to copy what
Lightning has or stay with what we used to do in Sunbird.

"""
What Sunbird needs is a vision of its own. That means, that new
Lightning features should no longer be incorporated into Sunbird by
default. Instead Sunbird needs to get its own identity to attract new
users. If you have experience with user interfaces, Sunbird could use
your help to create a new and innovative way for users to manage their
appointments.
"""

With that said, I think it makes sense to put up some concepts on how
Lightning could look with Thunderbird's Email features disabled. Ideally
in form of a UI mockup. I'm happy to blog about something like this.

If you are interested in getting started with this kind of future,
please do email me and/or discuss here. I'm happy to give some guidance
in getting started with patching the Calendar Project, then we can
discuss what bugs need to be fixed and put up some sort of roadmap.
Maybe you can put up a plan of things you'd like to change to
Thunderbird/Lightning to give it a standalone feel, then we can match
that up to bugs to divide the work into manageable chunks.

Thanks,
Philipp

[Jonah Karau]

Quite right, Phillipp!
Thanks to these ideas, I believe we can go in a different direction.
Many people like the standalone feel of Sunbird, so why don't we go in the direction of creating the ability to have this feel within Lightning and Thunderbird? Sure a few bugs here and there may need to be fixed, but even with any issues that would come up, combining the standalone feel of Sunbird with the speed and ease-of-use Lightning produces will create an excellent feel for users.
So rather than reviving Sunbird, let's work on improving Lightning and Thunderbird by enacting a "Lighting 'Standalone' Calendar Project"

Any ideas and resources are appreciated!

Special thanks to Mark and Phillipp for their input and ideas!

[karanveer Singh]

Hi,
We would love to hear something about the development roadmap about taking tb and lightning as an enterprise product.

///Karan

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[Jonah Karau]

We are still somewhat in "Idea & Planning" but any specific questions you have please ask away!

We're mostly taking down ideas so that we can have a less hectic style of alteration and editing so that the trial-and-error process goes smoother. At this point what we are looking at primarily is adding in a function to TB and Lightning that allows the user to switch between 3 functions - Just mail, just calendar, and both.
Currently TB and Lightning allow the "both" function as well as "just mail", but we want to both improve upon these for minimal interference with each other, and then add "just calendar" function.

[Tony Mechelynck]

Lightning "should" work with either Thunderbird or SeaMonkey, and in
fact it does — sort of. Every six weeks there is a new XPCOM version,
and Calendar and Mailer may get out of sync for a few days around that
time, which is a problem since Lightning is one of the few extensions to
which the "Default to Compatible" feature is not applicable. This also
means that, unless I want to run two "mailers" in parallel (one for Mail
and one for Calendar) there is no choice of versions: I have to use the
Calendar version which corresponds with my Mailer version — or vice versa.

Sunbird used to be quite lightweight compared to Thunderbird, and — if
you didn't need email invitations — it was quite useful as a standalone
program.

If Sunbird cannot be revived for fear of divergence, would it be
possible to run Lightning on top of xulrunner rather than of
Thunderbird? Hm, I suppose that if it were, it'd already've been done.
Or maybe run it on top of a stripped-down version of Thunderbird, with
the mail & news functions not needed by Lightning not just hidden but
outright removed at compile time?


I know that since it was abandoned, Sunbird has become more and more
outdated, yet I keep a precious copy of the last Sunbird build — this
one (2½ years already!):

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US;
rv:1.9.1.11pre) Gecko/20100526 Calendar/1.0b2pre
Build ID: 20100526025912

Time and again it has helped me a lot when something — anything —
prevented Lightning from running correctly on top of my trunk copy of
SeaMonkey. Yes, its timezone definitions are hopelessly outdated
("Timezone Definitions for Mozilla Calendar" version 1.2009p, installed
2010-06-14), but I rarely stray out of my own "Europe/Brussels" timezone
(CET/CEST), whose definition doesn't change, so that's not really a
problem. (And when I do, it's usually in order to define a non-repeating
event in Mozilla Standard Time; that one doesn't change much either.)


If and when Lightning becomes non-binary… yes, we can always dream,
can't we? Then it would default to compatible, and the worst of my
troubles with it would vanish instantly. It might even become as
trouble-free as ChatZilla. Time will tell…


Best regards,
Tony.
--
TALL KNIGHT: When you have found the shrubbery, then you must cut down the
mightiest tree in the forest ... with a herring.
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" PYTHON (MONTY)
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