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Sunbird 0.2 Released (MozillaZine)
MozillaZine carries the announcement of the first official release of the Sunbird calendaring program from the Mozilla Project. For the curious, screenshots can be found on the Sunbird page.
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Online calendars superior IMO Posted Feb 6, 2005 17:11 UTC (Sun) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link] Not sure the local-app idea makes that much sense for a calendar, which I view as a low-volume app domain where I place a higher emphasis on location indepence and publishing (let me see it anywhere, let me expose a public view to anyone). By "low-volume" I mean the amount of data going through this app tends to be low (rarely used) compared to something like an email client, which is high volume and benefits from the performance gains of a local client (i.e. I can't imagine going through my daily volume of mail with an online web-based mail app). I much prefer Yahoo Calendar as a result for calendaring.
Many users want local calendars, sufficient to replace Outlook Posted Feb 7, 2005 1:29 UTC (Mon) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] Actually, it's very important. Many users will not switch from Outlook to Thunderbird because Thunderbird does not include many groupware capabilities. Sunbird (and the Lightning project) hope to change that. An alternative may be Evolution, which is very capable and is to be ported to Windows, but even after that Evolution won't support Macs. For many users, the killer functionality is true platform independence, and Sunbird/Lightening have that possibility. If the same program is free, and works the same way across all platforms, that's suddenly a big win.Regarding local services... many users don't want to be so dependent on an outside source. If your service disappears, or decides to stop supporting you, or bumps up the price, what will you do? What happens when it goes down for a moment? Many people want to add an entry to their calendar without needing web access. So let users have what they want - local control - and support sync'ing to a variety of locations. It should be easy to support a remote service given a local service, but it's not true the other way around.
Many users want local calendars, sufficient to replace Outlook Posted Feb 8, 2005 0:02 UTC (Tue) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] >Many users will not switch from Outlook to Thunderbird because>Thunderbird does not include many groupware capabilities.
Neither does Sunbird, retrieval and publishing is really PIM, not groupware. What we really need in an interoperable calendaring (and general groupware) protocol.
Fortunately we have GroupDAV - http://www.groupdav.org which seem to be having really good luck; which Evolution and Kontact connectors, and support in at least two Groupware servers (OpenGroupware and Citadel).
Online calendars superior IMO Posted Feb 7, 2005 10:24 UTC (Mon) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] SunBird allows you to publish your calender.
What you say is implemented in Apple's iCal: you can store your selected calenders on iMac service. And you can allow everyone to see them from web and add your calenders to thiers iCals for automated syncing.
I believe it will be implemented by Sunbird/Thunderbird some time: convert calender to some specially marked xhtml, so it can be 1) freely imported and 2) browsed as plain html.
What is missing in Mozilla: address book. Apple's Address Book is really useful tool, including among other capabilities, syncing with portable devices and backing up your address book on iMac service.
On-line calender has one huge drawback: you have to be on-line to use it. Standalone apps allows you take best of all worlds: share it both on- & off-line.
Online calendars superior IMO Posted Feb 7, 2005 11:37 UTC (Mon) by juanjux (guest, #11652) [Link] You could be surprised how fast gmail can be with a broadband connection (at least faster loading and responding than any GUI mail client on my computer.)
Re: Online calendars superior IMO Posted Feb 7, 2005 14:01 UTC (Mon) by kmccarty (subscriber, #12085) [Link] You would be surprised how online calendars don't work on my laptop when I'm not connected to the Internet ;-)
Seriously, I am not going to rely on an online application for anything that I may want to work on (certainly including checking my calendar) while on the airplane, train, etc.
Online calendars superior IMO Posted Feb 7, 2005 23:56 UTC (Mon) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] >(at least faster loading and responding than any GUI mail client>on my computer.)
Simply put - you own a really slow computer.
No way is the web round trip + remote processing + local rendering going to be faster than a local client on a current computer.
Online calendars superior IMO Posted Feb 7, 2005 23:51 UTC (Mon) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] > which I view as a low-volume app domain wher
Nice for you. You aren't a vet, psychiatrist, dentist, or work on scheduled maintenance items. Calendaring is a very long way from a low-volume application for a whole heckuva-lot-of-people.
local server Posted Feb 6, 2005 19:16 UTC (Sun) by a_hippie (guest, #34) [Link] I don't mind using an external app, however, I wouldn't be so eager to trust my business info on anything like yahoo/google.
Then there is the infrastructure--the ability to set up native apps inside an infrastructure makes this app all the more valuable.
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