OEone Scales Back Calendar Development
Wednesday March 19th, 2003
Mike Potter, who leads the development of Mozilla Calendar, has posted a newsgroup message about the project's status to netscape.public.mozilla.calendar. Most of the current work on Calendar is funded by OEone, who utilise its code in their HomeBase Desktop application. However, a change of priorities at OEone means that Calendar will not be receiving the same level of development attention as in the past. While work on the project will not stop altogether, the rate of progress is likely to be slower than that seen previously.
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i donīt embrace the progression. calendar is one of my favourite apps. many customers could have used it as good alternative to outlook calendar. but in this state of development, calendar (imho) isnīt usable for the mass.
some features like alerts, mail notifications and others, arenīt working as needed.
i hope that some developers will put their energy in calendar trunk. sometimes i think, that development wents the wrong way.
yes, this delay makes it not really easier to get users away from Outlook. many want to kill this virus spreading machine, but without any working alternative? Any developer here needing work? ;)
So, the plan of including Calendar in Moz 1.4 is dead?
Well, the calender is already included in Unix/Linux and all it take is the prefix option '--enable-calender' when configuring it. As for Windows, there is an XPI for calender somewhere at <http://www.mozilla.org>, anyone can install it if anyone want it. I don't know about the Mac itself. Those calender feature I'm referring to are limit because of the bugs and slow progress.
Basicially, they are not enabled/install by default which is why we don't see them.
P.S. I'm pretty much disppointed about the slower progress of the calender. I hope things will be for the best....
> P.S. I'm pretty much disppointed about the slower progress of the calender. I hope things will be for the best....
You have the code. Don't be disappointed, do something!
For those who are not programmers capable of working on the code themselves, you also have the option of starting a fund to pay developers to work on the code.
I can donate $20 if there is paypal for this type of things... I wish I have time to write the code for the calender but I would need to become familar with the coding for the calender. But bzbarsky stand correct that we can do something about it because we have the code.....
>> For those who are not programmers capable of working on the code themselves, you also have the option of starting a fund to pay developers to work on the code.
When I see BenB get roaming profiles done I might have some faith in that process.
well
1) calendar works *if* you compile it from the source youself as an integrated part of Mozilla
2) the *.xpi you can make, makes Mozilla crash *HARD* upon installation (bug 197105)
3) in Mozilla 1.2.1 the *.xpi installs, but there seem to be missing something (libical) in the Mozilla code
I don't build Mozilla, but calendar is spelled with an a, so you'd probably "--enable-calendar" when building.
- MXN
Yo, I installed the latest version of calendar from <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/> and when I restarted Mozilla and tried using it, the entire toolbar is messed up! I can see every up, down and over state of the buttons on the toolbar.
Too bad they are slowing down work on this, the calendar has some good prospects. (One feature I'd like to see is iPlanet calendar integration/synchronization.)
Later!
Yea, I agree the calender have some good prospect.... It doesn't work on mine using Windows XP, when I first install it it look nice and when I try to create an appointment date on the calender. That's when the calender hung. I had to kill hte browser.
Good. Calendaring doesn't belong in a browser anyhow.
#8 Neither does, mail, news, chat, address book...
by bmacfarland
Thursday March 20th, 2003 11:18 AM
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but if you are going to have those you might as well have the suite with calendar app as it's the final piece that can allow someone to schedule a meeting via mail, through your address book nicknames, and have it in the schedule. Something like this can compete with Outlook which is something few things can do.
You don't have to install it if you don't want it. As much as you don't have to install MailNews and ChatZilla. What's the problem with all these people that shout "Stop developping X, I want only Y"? Everyone works on what he wants to or gets paid for. Or did you pay OEone to develop a browser and they've given you a calender?
I want to see Netscape become relevant again but it won't happen as long as resources are spread so thinly across so many different projects. Phoenix is promising, even more so if Netscape can be convinced to dump the suite and distribute Phoenix. AOL Communicator and AIM have a much better shot at competing with Outlook.
Resources are not spread. mikep &co have never worked on any part of Mozilla but Calendar and will likely never do so. They could have not worked on Mozilla at all, I suppose. But since they needed some things to get Calendar running, they contributed code to the core XUL toolkit.
You can call that "spreading resources" if you will, but I fail to see how that term applies here.
Do you hang around microsoft sites and complain that the windows 9x kernel could have been really good, if only they hadn't 'spread resourses' by also creating mice and joysticks? Or maybe that Internet Explorer would be really great if only they hadn't been distracted by creating Excel? Or do you accept, in that case, that these projects are entirely unrelated? Because you seem to have a hard time grasping the fact that people can work on different Mozilla based applications without removing any development time from either the browser or the gecko/necko/etc. core.
That's a pretty lousy analogy, don't you think? Note to everyone: it's not useful to make comparisons to Microsoft because Microsoft is rather unique.
But to somewhat address your point, it's painfully obvious that Mozilla was tremendously over-scoped such that there was no chance they'd ever be able to get a competitive browser produced.
I thought that we were all rather unique. That is one of the things that makes life so interesting :-)
>> I want to see Netscape become relevant again but it won't happen as long as resources are spread so thinly across so many different projects.
How many times do we have to spell this out for you? The Calendar developers are NOT being diverted from the browser project.
You bring up this non-point on virtually every topic you post to.
Christ.
None of the calendar engineers are Netscape employees. I fail to see how Netscape has anything to do with whether or not Mozilla should have a calendar project. Netscape doesn't pay calendar developers. They don't QA the calendar. They don't distribute the calendar. They don't support the calendar. Most of Netscape probably don't even know that it exists. Your concerns about calendar impacting Netscape are confused at best.
--Asa
If "Netscape" does not know about the calendar efforts it's a shame. I really thought it a worthwile addition to the suite. I understand that the current status does not allow for use in a corporation. I still hoped it would make it into the Netscape releases - to fight IE and Outlook.
I agreed with Asa. Mail/News is what Netscape worked on. Chatzilla, who know who worked on it. Calender is done by Oeone. You see, as the browser grow, so will the additional components with variety of features we may one day need. This is what make Mozilla so great!!!!
i look forward to a calender integrated with my email.
if you dont need it dont download it. However your statement is very shortsighted since it ignores the fact that many users, especially in a business environment not only need a calendar, but would also be very happy to get a calender app that is tightly integrated with mail and browser. There are a lot of innovative features and functions possible and implementing them would make Mozila a killer app for many.
The calendar is an offshoot / side benefit of the OeONE Desktop project (which to me is an even more interesting use of the Moz platform), which is what they are actually freezing. I wonder if this is temporary while they bring the ASP (Application Service Provider, ie Anywhere) side up to snuff, or if the desktop project is going to be killed?
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