The first public Sunbird release

Sunbird is far from complete, but it's much more stable than one might expect from an application at version 0.2. We used Sunbird for a couple of days without experiencing any crashes or "show stopper" bugs. There are a few glitches in Sunbird 0.2, which is to be expected. For example, copying and pasting an event from Thursday to Friday changed the start and end times of the event. There are also a few minor interface glitches, but nothing that would prevent a user from getting work done with Sunbird.

To test Sunbird's calendar import feature and handling of iCal files, we grabbed the U.S. holiday calendar from the Mozilla's holiday files page, and a few calendars from iCalShare. Sunbird had no problems importing the calendars, though it automatically pushed the displayed month back to the start of the calendars.

The Sunbird roadmap shows how far Sunbird has progressed so far. Sunbird lacks the ability to export to HTML, edit remote calendars, accept invitations from Outlook users, and a number of other features. Still, the list of features that are complete is larger than the list of incomplete features. The list is not entirely up to date, either. For example, the "work week view" feature is available, though the roadmap doesn't show this feature as complete. This is, in fact, one of this writer's favorite features in Sunbird. The user can specify the days of their work week, and display only those days in the calendar view. Since this writer works a decidedly non-standard work week (Thursday through Sunday) this can come in quite handy.

As a standalone calendar application, Sunbird is already on its way to being a useful project. However, many users are going to want a calendar application that integrates with a mailer and browser. To that end, there's Project Lightning. Lightning is still in the early development phase, so there's very little concrete information about it, but the general gist of the project is to provide tighter integration between Thunderbird and Sunbird. The first general-user release of Lightning is tentatively scheduled for mid-2005.

Another area where Sunbird needs help is device synchronization. Right now, the application doesn't offer any automatic method of synchronizing with a PDA, which is a feature that many users will want from a calendaring application.

Why should users care about Sunbird when we already have Evolution and KDE PIM, which are much further along than Sunbird? The primary reason is multi-platform support. While Evolution and KDE PIM have much to recommend them, wide cross-platform availability is something that neither project can offer at this time. Companies that are looking to standardize on an application will want something that runs on Windows, and possibly Mac OS X as well.

Sunbird is a promising application. Given the quality of Firefox and Thunderbird, not to mention the original Mozilla suite, we're optimistic that Sunbird will be an excellent calendaring application when it grows up.