Mozilla Sunbird ReviewMonday September 6th, 2004Steve Mallett writes in: "Mozilla Sunbird is the latest stand-alone application from the Mozilla foundation that follows in the footsteps of now revered browser Firefox and email client Thunderbird. OSDir reviews their first public release, version 0.2." UPDATE: Sunbird 0.2 is not actually available yet, they are currently working towards it. The review is of a nightly build. I hate to be nit-picky, but the release is 0.2, not 2.0. I love Sunbird, works great as a standalone app. -JN sure would appreciate anyone's help resolving this: news://news.mozilla.org:119/ch5pq1$am43@ripley.netscape.com can't get any version of calendar to work on my debian unstable box. To make the calendar a stand alone app is rather absurd: there are tons of calendar apps already and many do more than sunbird. What would be really useful is the integration with TB, e.g. allowing emails to have deadlines and follow-up actions. Emails often are about work, todos, deadlines etc and therefore there are many ways how a tight integration of the two would increase productivity. Another thing is that calendar should finally make holidays properties of days, instead of events, so that events and time-spans can be based on the properties - e.g. "every first monday that is not a holyday" or "every 10 workdays". I agree. Having the calendar integrated with Thunderbird would place Thunderbird closer to Outlook (non express version) in terms of competition. Netscape used to have a very good calendar app which evolved into the standalone pgm Corporate Time. The latest version of that might still be available--I found it via a Google search. Maybe someday Sunbird will catch up to Corporate Time, but it has a long way to go. AFAIK Corporate Time client is still available as a free download from Oracle - who now own it. However, to get full functionality from it it requires special server sid applications that are not available for a reasonable price. If you are a single user of it it is fine, but for users who want to interact with other calendars without requiring dedicated server side software it is probably not the best option. A lot of universities appear to use corporate time on their networks, which does mean that there are a lot of tutorials guides to it available on websites. I have been using the Mozilla Calendar extension for FireFox. I also tried Sunbird. From a first look they look pretty similar, and they have similar features. What is the advantage to have sunbird, when you can have an extension that does pretty much the same (with a very much smaller footprint)? Sunbird doesnt integrate with firefox or thunderbird (well not as much as the extension).....the real advantage to using it i guess is if you dont use FF or TB or dont want to have to load these apps to use the calendar. Functionality wise I think they are pretty similar I'm not a Sunbird developer (I just helped with the theme a bit), so they are free to correct me, but my understanding is that the extension and the stand-alone application both use the "ical" library, so when everything settles out, there should be the same functionality in the extension as in Sunbird (at a minimum, integration aside for a moment). And yes, Sunbird the stand-alone application is just that - stand alone - for those who are not using Thunderbird/Firefox or who prefer to have their calendar running even when their email client and/or browser aren't running. ....i still can't get this piece of dogshit to work on my debian box. not sunbird, or either of the plugins. ok, I've had the standalone and the plugin working on debian stable and unstable. More likely a dogshit operator than dogshit software... |