Mozilla struck by Lightning

We're gearing up for an encore presentation at the Philadelphia area Linux Users' Group next week and the Meldware session at the Next Generation Data Center conference in San Francisco, CA which is co-located with Linuxworld. Meanwhile a lot is happening. The first big event takes place outside of Buni.org entirely: Mozilla has released Lightning 0.5. You'll recall that Lightning provides calendar services to Mozilla's Thunderbird email client. You can grab the latest WCAP version of the Lightning 0.5 plugin here. You'll hopefully recall that WCAP is the protocol that we use to expose calendar functionality to email clients. So guys, I'm really excited about this release. Not only is it WAY prettier but it fixes some nasty little six-legged features from 0.3 (don't ask what happened to 0.4...there is no 4...why do you ask such questions?). I was so excited I had to immediately patch MCS to work with the latest version (the incompatibilities they introduced where very minor).

For a little demo we create a user via Meldware Communciation Suite's graphical administration tool:

Then we can pop into TBird and create a new event:

And we can invite some other folks (I secretly created another user buniluni1@localhost while you weren't looking):

Who says open source GUIs can't be sexy!!! Okay the info is kind of boring because we're both free all day. Here is what it would look like if we tried to schedule another meeting (after we save this one):

One of the things I really like is that you cn move the shaded part graphically and it changes the time. Another thing I like is that it dropped the red/green scheme. I dunno who does usability for these guys but umm... Red Green color blindess affects 7-10% of men (virtually no women). Not only that, but I'd tend to bet that the proportions are higher in those that work a lot with computers. Anyhow I thought the lightning 0.3 screen was ugly and, as a result of the color-blindness really, kind of mean (yes I can see it fine). see:

The Weekly view is also more attractive/usable:

The montly view is nicer, you can really see the 3d effect of the blue :-)

And the day view:

Okay so I try and be ecumenical to Linux vendors (but love of Ubuntu comes out) and clients...but TBird+Lightning are my favorite and the new TBird 2.0 is much faster with the IMAP. However, Evolution tends to bug me. While its WCAP implementation is more sophisticated and does smarter things with offline views...Evolution is HORRID to develop for because if you get something wrong it crashes. Worse....it hangs. Not only that but sometimes when you kill it....it kills GNOME or at least your task bar. (No KDE-wankers bother me, I've never been sold on KDE from the QT-license fun to now...push your evildoer UI on some other unsuspecting open source villan). Not only that but they just caught the buffer underflow error in their IMAP that we found while developing Meldware...but they only got 1 and haven't found the corresponding overflow! Great example of why we chose the technologies we did for Meldware :-) -- we CAN'T code underflow/overflows :-). Yes, I'm sure Outlook is even worse and Apple's Mail.app has the worst IMAP ever. That rant aside, I've code in HEAD that integrates with Evolution:

weekly

monthly

monthly

While the calendar screens are nice, the setup is akward and the create event is kind of ugly (and the screens are not child windows of the application which is REALLY annoying):

I should have the freebusy support for Evolution fixed in the head shortly, but it is less attractive as well:

Note all the extra events are because Evolution caches them offline (a good thing) and just checks for recently modified/deleted (also good) but offers no easy way to resynch if you like drop the DB during development (pain for me, likely irrelevant to you).

Anyhow, my personal preferences aside, the complete open source groupware stack is a reality today with TBird/Lightning and Meldware (albiet you need to build HEAD if you want to use 0.5 ;-) ) and wait till you see what we're cooking up next!

BTW thanks to Sun for writing the plugins to connect Meldware Calendar to Evolution and Thunderbird. We might have done it without you but boy it would have taken a lot longer!

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