Future of Mozilla Calendar
Mike Potter
think its time to continue that discussion. Interest in the calendar
application has been increasing lately, as has much of the interest in
the Mozilla browser.
I have decided at this time to retire from leading the calendar project
and to transfer the project leadership role to Mostafa Hosseini, a
fellow employee here at OEone who has coded much of the calendar, both
back end and front end.
As of today, Mostafa will be in charge of reviewing patches and checking
the code into CVS, building new XPIs and updating the website. If
anyone would like to help out with any of those duties, I'm sure he
would appreciate the help.
We discussed moving the project to MozDev, but decided against that for
now, since the calendar is being built by default on Sun platforms, and
is included in their 1.4 builds. Plus, the extra exposure we get from
the Mozilla project is very helpful to us. I doubt that we will ever be
included in any default builds from Mozilla, as was the plan originally.
The seperation of the Mozilla apps has decided that fate for us.
The official plan, in my eyes, is still to get the calendar as a stand
alone application, like Thunderbird or Firebird. Hopefully someone out
there can take that project on.
As always, this project is in need of resources: people who would like
to help out with the coding, website maintenance, management activities
etc... If you would like to help out, you need to be proactive and get
involved. File bugs in bugzilla, verify bugs in bugzilla, request CVS
access (to add code and to update the website).
There has been a lot of interest in this project, from small companies
and large companies like Sun and Lindows. Hopefully this project
continues, and those companies continue to support this project.
Thanks. Its been fun to be involved in the start up of a project of
this magnitude.
Mike
Mike Potter
OEone Corporation
http://www.oeone.com
DiabolicDevilX
> The official plan, in my eyes, is still to get the calendar as a stand
> alone application, like Thunderbird or Firebird. Hopefully someone out
> there can take that project on.
Wouldn't it be more useful to make it an extension to Mozilla
Thunderbird to turn it into an Outlook-like personal information
manager?
Jan Gundtofte-Bruun
> Mike Potter <mi...@oeone.com> wrote:
>>The official plan, in my eyes, is still to get the calendar as a stand
>>alone application, like Thunderbird or Firebird. Hopefully someone out
>>there can take that project on.
> Wouldn't it be more useful to make it an extension to Mozilla
> Thunderbird to turn it into an Outlook-like personal information
> manager?
My thoughts as well. A combined email application + contacts manager +
calendar/agenda ("do-all") application seems to me to be more than the
sum of its parts.
While it may be argued that if such a suite of separate applications
work together seamlessly enough it might be just as good as a composite
application, but to me it doesn't quite explain an advantage.
On the one hand, several smaller projects may be more manageable, but on
the other it might also break the inherent uniformity and seamlessness
of a do-all application.
The best argument as I see it, then, is that if they are separate
entities each user can mix and use what he wants.
:o) JanGB
--
And he disappeared in a puff of logic.
Ben M
I suggest that the approach suggested in the mozilla roadmap for Thunderbird
would be appropriate for the calendar. Namely that the calendar can either
be standalone *or* an extension to Firebird or Thunderbird.
note the "squared circle" around thunderbird in the roadmap architecture
diagram on this page http://mozilla.org/roadmap.html
I personally would use (and prefer) calendar as a standalone application. I
have a mail program I am quite happy with at the moment and don't see why I
should be forced to move all my filters and accounts and mail history over
to another mail application in order to use a calendar. (or have another
mail application floating around trying to handle all my mailto links when I
wanted to use my default mail client, bad mozilla! anyone in my old position
add 'user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mailto", true);' to your
user.js to fix it)
Anyway by following the route where calendar can be both seperate or
integrated i feel we get the best of both worlds. Those who want a more
integrated suite of applications can have it while those who just want a
calendar can have that to!
--
BenM
http://www.benmeadowcroft.com/
Kenneth Pardue
I agree completely with this either/or approach to the future of
calendar, giving it the ability to "plug-and-play" with Thunderbird or,
by the time it reaches it, 1.5+ Mozilla Mail&News.
Can we get some official feedback into this thread to place to rest
speculation, or is this something that is still being decided?
Thanks,
Kenneth
Mostafa Hosseini
Hopefully it would be possible to have calendar both as a standalone
application and as an extension to Firebird or Thunderbird. The latter
is addressed in bug 200257 and the former needs a bit of investigation
and tweaking.
Art Cancro
> I suggest that the approach suggested in the mozilla roadmap for Thunderbird
> would be appropriate for the calendar. Namely that the calendar can either
> be standalone *or* an extension to Firebird or Thunderbird.
>
> note the "squared circle" around thunderbird in the roadmap architecture
> diagram on this page http://mozilla.org/roadmap.html
>
> I personally would use (and prefer) calendar as a standalone application. I
> have a mail program I am quite happy with at the moment and don't see why I
> should be forced to move all my filters and accounts and mail history over
> to another mail application in order to use a calendar. (or have another
> mail application floating around trying to handle all my mailto links when I
> wanted to use my default mail client, bad mozilla! anyone in my old position
> add 'user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mailto", true);' to your
> user.js to fix it)
>
> Anyway by following the route where calendar can be both seperate or
> integrated i feel we get the best of both worlds. Those who want a more
> integrated suite of applications can have it while those who just want a
> calendar can have that to!
Sounds good, but how do you get your "other" mail program to recognize
calendar events that arrive in your inbox, such as meeting requests, or
replies to meeting requests?
Your mail program has to be able to recognize messages that have
calendar MIME types in them, and send those over to the calendar
program. This implies that you would be using the same program for mail
and calendar.
If the Mail and Calendar apps were integrated together, this is a
no-brainer. It also makes it *very* straightforward to store your
calendar in a folder on the IMAP server, which is imperative if we want
to take Calendar to the next level.
I don't see any way to do this with Calendar being used as a standalone
application.
Who has the authority to make the final decision on this?
Richard Klein
It one of the other groups there is a discussion going on about GRE
level extensions. Personally, I think calendar should be a standalone
app that has a GRE level extension to add it to Thunderbird or Firebird.
Joshua Wilner
>>>>>> The official plan, in my eyes, is still to get the calendar as a
>>>>>> stand alone application, like Thunderbird or Firebird. Hopefully
>>>>>> someone out there can take that project on.
My perspective is totally that of an end-user who appreciated Outlook's
integration of functions but got tired of all the security issues. I
only want to reiterate what has been implicit in many people's comments
but not emphasized as such: coordination with Thunderbird is important
to me; coordination with Firebird does not matter to me at all.
If, from a programming point of view, it became necessary to make a
choice between integration with Thunderbird and development of Calendar
as a standalone, I would definitely go with integration. But if the two
possibilities can be realized without conflict, then obviously having
both is preferable.
Mårten Svantesson
> Sounds good, but how do you get your "other" mail program to recognize
> calendar events that arrive in your inbox, such as meeting requests,
> or replies to meeting requests?
>
> Your mail program has to be able to recognize messages that have
> calendar MIME types in them, and send those over to the calendar
> program.
Yes.
> This implies that you would be using the same program for
> mail and calendar.
What? It doesn't imply that at all. It just means that my mail program
needs to be able to issue a command like "mozcal -remote
AddCalendar(calendar.ics)" or something like that when I recieve an
attachment with mime-type text/calendar. And Mozilla Calendar needs to
be able to issue a command along the lines of "mail -compose
f...@bar.com,fu...@bart.se -attach invitation.ics".
> If the Mail and Calendar apps were integrated together, this is a
> no-brainer. It also makes it *very* straightforward to store your
> calendar in a folder on the IMAP server, which is imperative if we
> want to take Calendar to the next level.
Using IMAP as a calendar server doesn't seem like more than a ugly
hack to me since the IMAP-protocol simply isn't intended for the
purpose.
> I don't see any way to do this with Calendar being used as a
> standalone application.
Well, I might have better imagination. ;-)
> Who has the authority to make the final decision on this?
The one who implements it...
--
- Mårten
mail: m...@kth.se *** ICQ: 4356928 *** mobile: +46 (0)707390385
Jack Johnson
> Hopefully it would be possible to have calendar both as a standalone
> application and as an extension to Firebird or Thunderbird. The latter
> is addressed in bug 200257 and the former needs a bit of investigation
> and tweaking.
In what way does the former need tweaking?
I'm using both Calendar and ChatZilla as plugins for Firebird and I've
been extremely happy with the performance on both fronts. The creation
of the launcher seems to be the only semi-technical step on either front.
With the removal of the Navigator & Calendar launch items in the
lower-left and the Navigator item in the Window menu, I think it would
be nearly indistinguishable from a standalone app (from a user perspective).
-Jack
P.S.
I'd just like to voice my thanks and appreciation to you and Mike for
everything you've done for the calendar project, and thank you OEone!
Eric Belhaire
> Mostafa Hosseini wrote:
>
>> Hopefully it would be possible to have calendar both as a standalone
>> application and as an extension to Firebird or Thunderbird. The latter
>> is addressed in bug 200257 and the former needs a bit of investigation
>> and tweaking.
>
>
> In what way does the former need tweaking?
>
> I'm using both Calendar and ChatZilla as plugins for Firebird and I've
> been extremely happy with the performance on both fronts. The creation
> of the launcher seems to be the only semi-technical step on either front.
>
The creation of the launcher for Firebird has been done in the bug mentioned by Mostafa :
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200257
The code is for testing purposes and as not been included in CVS. The reason to not include this
code now is clearly explain in Mike comment http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200257#c14
(You can had your own comment).
I tried to modify the code to allow calendar to be used as an extension of Thunderbird.
Unfortunately, it does not work with the Thunderbird version I tried. The reason of this seems to be
that the Thunderbird code is not coherent. Some code from the Mozilla Application Suite has been
suppress in the Thunderbird application. For example, XUL and JS of the communicator module are
still in hierarchy (and are called by calendar), but the corresponding DTD files has been
suppressed. All this leads to the well known red error messages in the window.
I think that it is better to wait a little bit that Thunderbird stabilized and to make latter the
choice to modify the calendar code. We will then have two choices :
- trying to include calendar in the Thunderbird application (in the code point of view this means
with a lot of overlays) ;
- suppress as much as possible the overlays and Browser/Mail code use inside the calendar application.
> With the removal of the Navigator & Calendar launch items in the
> lower-left and the Navigator item in the Window menu, I think it would
> be nearly indistinguishable from a standalone app (from a user
> perspective).
From the user perspective, the calendar app as an extension will be indistinguishable from an
standalone app if it does not include any overlay to smoothly fit in the Browser/Mail app. Those
possible overlays could be :
- an inclusion of the calendar options/preferences inside the Browser/Mail ones ;
- a sidebar in the browser ;
- a plugin for a nice display an an easy of the mail appointments in the Mail app ;
- .... (some other ideas ?)
My 2 cts,
Eric