Calendar Talk:Lightning

Just a thought for Sunbird specific dev's but make the popups modal (so they can't hide) and also create a small service and a taskbar icon to monitor date/time that can work even if the GUI has not been started, then set the program to run in the startup folder, but minimized.

Sync

snipper quite a few comments about syncing. No need to say the same thing over and over again. Summary of the comments: I want to sync calendar/sunbird/lightning to sync with my phone/pda/etc. maybe use syncml

Syncing will be very important. Once you can get the data out to something like Yahoo Calendar or Google's upcoming Calendar, there are a ton of widgets and services that will work with it.

28-2-07: well Google Calendar has arrived. The ability to link to the Google ICAL URL for the synch would be ideal

What do you mean with that? The Google Provider doesn't use the ICAL url, it uses the xml feed. --XFallenAngel 03:25, 3 March 2007 (PST)

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About syncing, i would like to sync with ical.app (on mac osx) directly over bluetooth

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I know there are a lot of issues with users not being able to sync Thunderbird and Lightning with Nokia's PC Suite. As it is a permanent feature on all windows machines, what is the likelihood of Thunderbird/Lightning duplicating all entries in real time to the Outlook database? This way, all your data could be processed through Thunderbird and Lightning, but the Nokia PC Suite could sync your mobile product using Outlook or Outlook Express DB. As TB does have the ability to import data from Outlook, theoretically, TB could import the changes to the Outlook DB on startup. Is this a feasible work around?

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I couldn't have said the comment above any better, I would love being able to work like this through Nokia PC Suite and the Outlook database, at least if this is done the outlook folder won't be useless on my machine.

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I think it would be helpful to list the options available for folks that want to sync and share their Thunderbird address books, calendars. Here is a start:

The ScheduleWorld Thunderbird add-on will synchronize the Thunderbird address book. You can also easily share address books with your family and co-workers. If you have Lightning installed you can also sync your calendars and task lists. ScheduleWorld also makes it a snap to sync your data with cell phones, PDAs, or even other people using Google, Outlook or Evolution.

The ScheduleWorld add-on works equally well with Windows, OSX and Linux, using Thunderbird 2.x and 3.x.

There is also beta support available for syncing your cell phone over bluetooth so you don't have to pay cell phone data charges to sync.

For more information and an easy to use email installation process please visit: http://wiki.scheduleworld.com/wiki/Thunderbird_Configuration

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Reoccurring dates

I love lightning. But one thing I have noticed with it and Sunbird is some difficulty applying the repeating dates. For example: I would like to put a date on my calender that occurs at the end of every month, well they do not end all in the same date... So I have to create exceptions for each that doesn't have the given repeat date. Also, I would like to create a repeating monthly item that is on the 15th, but only on weekdays, and/or (this seems more complicated) the Friday before the weekend if the 15th lands on a weekend. If I could set these up and/or bi-monthly occurrences that would be awesome. - Thanks.

There are now some features applied in lightning, however, because the developers haven't figured out how to parse recurring from subscribed ics, you can only work these from a calendar in lightning.

Obvious but overlooked?

URL should be clickable double-clicking a task pops up a window on which you can click "more" - to reveal a URL. That URL should be clickable (or have a "goto URL" button) and it should be accessible without having to click "more". The reason? We've integrated with RT (Request Tracker) and mapped the due dates and tasks into Thunderbird/Lighting. Getting back into the web RT queue is via this URL. GS

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This may be an obvious feature but a Thunderbird user should be able to right-click any received email and assign it to the calendar. The 'Flag for Follow-up' feature in Outlook is ok, but you could make it SO much better. Many of the below ideas are excellent, but don't overlook basic functionality!

KM

[19/10/2005] I've often thought that the folder pane in Thunderbird is far too e-mail centric. If the folder pane, neigh Thunderbird itself, where tabbed (e-mail, news/rss and calendar) the folder pane could be used exclusively for navigation etc... while the main pane(s) could display the inbox(es), news feed(s) or graphical calendar(s).

Anubeon

That's a great point. AZ

Shared Calendar Functionality

It would also be nice to have some form of 'Shared' calendar functionality, similar to how Outlook's calendar works with M$ Exchange - So users can share a sort-of 'Global' calendar and see each others events. Panther

It could be important for old Outlook users to have the Free/Busy indicator on shared calendars. Merome

Re: Pather's idea, I think it should be more-so than Outlook's shared calendar. There needs to be a way for a group of users to hold personal calendars and, without much trouble, have a group/office calendar with a 'public' subset of the member's personal appointments in it. Additionally, the ability to add a meeting to the group calendar that is automatically added to the member's personal calendars is a must. Multiple group membership would also be a prerequisite. The idea would be to store the data once and have it display in more than one place. Right now, the secretaries in my office have to double-book meetings (once in everyone's personal calendars, then once in the public calendar). Everyone is frustrated at the extra work required and it would be wise to strike while the iron's hot.

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I agree that shared calendaring is a must, but I like Sunbird's way of amalgamating calendars into one view. In the example above, you'd just create the group calendar and import it into Lightning. You would need to make sure that the calendar was refreshed or checked periodically to make sure that things were up to date.

In addition, I would dearly like to layer calendars, and have some calendars (like a group calendar I'm not particularly interested in most of the time) appear washed out or translucent. I could set that calendar to be unobtrusive by having it in the background of my main composite calendar display and events in it would be faded and covered by events in the composite on top.

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What about creating a system to share topic-specific calendars through email? Encouraging people to use email to share appointments, or notify scheduling changes, could give much more integration. Of course the emails would be preformatted by Lightning, readable as emails but also automatically generating a calendar, you could choose not to visualize them in Thunderbird, and their related topic calendar would be deleted when you put them in the undesired or trash folders. This way, if popular websites and institutions start using this system, you could have a calendar containing your $videogame clan scheduled frag meetings, another with your car's scheduled checkups/insurance/new regulations deadlines, another with taxes/mortgages etc., then even one showing TV programmes, but only the tv shows and genres you subscribed for... Alpha Ti

Re: Alpha Ti's idea, I like the idea of calendar sharing through email alone. Right now the only way to dynamically share a calendar (not event) is to host it somewhere and have people subscribe to it. How about adding a list of email addresses to a calendar itself, not just events, such that any change to any event in that calendar is automatically emailed as an ICS attachment to everyone in the list? That way anyone using Lightning can create a shared calendar without having to find a CalDAV host. This may even be possible to add into an ICS file already so that other ICS aware applications could add the same support. Synchronization would be an issue, but adding a version number to the calendar that gets incremented on each change, and a simple warning dialog when there is a version conflict could resolve that. --MHall

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I can see the option to add a new remote calendar but can't seem to find a way of either creating or adding the location of other calenders on a local server. Has this been implemented yet?

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What about using an smb share? You can have the permissions set to the share already thus only allowing authorized users to view it, or allow everyone read for a group calendar, etc. etc. etc. SMB would be the limitation rather that setting up special log ins, and many companies already have group smb shares set up. You could have the program lock the file when saving changes, and then release it when done. If 2 people try to edit at the same time, the file would be locked by the first one, and have the other client keep trying for xx seconds to see if it is unlocked, once it is, lock the file and commit changes, then unlock again. I wouldn't think this would be a steep change. Obviously do refreshes on the file every so many seconds/minutes to check for changes.

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It is possible (on a small scale anyway) to share a group Lightning calendar on a windows SMB or CIFS mapped drive instead of implementing a proper DAV type service. Be advised, this is an egregious kludge and I'm sure a race condition between two users writing to the same .ics file could easily occur in practice as this is not officially supported functionality and there doesn't appear to be any locking mechanism implemented in Lightning -- wouldn't trust filesystem locks either, however, in testing, intentionally racing 2 instances of Lightning (creating a new event) threw a "calendar changed remotely, please reload and reapply" error on one instance when writing to a shared .ics hosted on a samba 3.3.8. This error might also toggle a client into read-only mode, so some concurrency checks seem to be implemented. Did not cause any data corruption in a few test collisions.

As of Lightning ver 1.0b7, a user can create a new calendar, then right-click "export" it into an .ics file. The ics file can moved to a network share. Any user who can read the file can then "File/Open/Calendar File" to load it into Lightning. If the user has write access, they can update and add events to the calendar. You can set calendar properties to refresh once a minute (restart to take effect), or manually on demand, to propagate changes.

This obviously won't scale well, say, beyond a few users in the same room (shout "hey, I'm updating the calendar") making infrequent updates, but it's stupid simple to set up if you can tolerate a clobbered event once in a while.

The previous post suggests adding application level locking (maybe a .lck file?), which might be reliable enough to serve a small office??

jimfraud 2011/10/10

Exchange

Since Novel has released their exchange interface Open Source will this functionality be included into Lightning? This feature would allow me to switch straight away.

wily: And there are *so* many corporate workplaces who just aren't going to get rid of their Exchange servers. Trust me, I've tried to convince a few. An open source client with full integration would be extremely useful, and the attempts I've seen to date have been rather poor.

The first thing to do maybe is an extension for exchange , that would : - Set the IMAP account if available , providing the server name ( nothing special here)

- Set the LDAP port to the exchange one and ask for the LDAP server, Maybe there is a way to get it from the exchange server ?

Notes

I was very excited when I heard of the announcement of this project. It has almost everything I need to make the switch. If it includes a "Notes" feature, I would make the switch. Not that me making the switch is very significant for anyone but me.

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The notes idea is interesting. One issue that I have had with most calendar apps is that you must have a 'Due Date' and time for any task. I would like to have the ability (by default) to create a task and not have it associated with a due date. If I need to give it one later, then fine, but by default, let me create it without one. Additionally, if I have a task that needs to be completed sometime today, I want it to show up as "Due Today", not "Due at 8:05 AM, March 30, 2006". A task is NOT an event!

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I too would really like a 'notes' feature in Lightning. Ical/ics has the VJOURNAL entity, which ties text notes to a particular date. I think it would be very handy to be able to have a universal 'notes' button on the UI that would let you add/edit a VJOURNAL entry for that day, plus browse VJOURNAL entries for previous days.

Other Open Source Projects

Evolution is backending to the opengroupware, which has a HTML interface to most exchange like functions. I am not sure at which level that lightning could replace outlook. Will it just be on the interface level ? Connecting to an exchange server ?

Red Hat has also recently purchased Netscape from AOL, I believe that this may also include the Netscape Calendering server, which may be an interesting addition to any server side application which may wish to replace exchange.

Looking at the server side, which is important when it comes to a groupware / pseudo-groupware aspect of this, there is SchoolBell, the calendar server component from SchoolTool, which has recently had its 1.0 release. We are successfully running Sunbird as clients with SchoolBell as server in our office for calendar sharing. http://www.schooltool.org/schoolbell

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People are asking for integration, replacement, groupware and what role Lightning could play in this game.

IMO there are enough Groupwares out, there are PIM applications out, but all those end up killing the individual.

May be Lightning could simply be as what it already is, a replacement for any of these already existing PIM-Monsters. I need to organize my task and my calendar. If I would need integration/groupware I would not chose Lightning and stay with Kdepim or any other.

Lightning is also Lightweight and please do not change this.

As far as I can say it is actually the best Calendar application out there. When it becomes just another PIM-Monster it might not be the best anymore.

Using a plugin as SyncKolab is a great add-on to share my data between home, work and laptop. Easy, fast and not complicated, no study necessary, intuitive like it should be.

So thanks to all who work on this and please do net get lost. Doing what everybody does brings the same results everybody already got.

20120808

thanks Hans

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Guys thank you for spending time and efforts on such a great project.I tried the extension yesterday and it works well!! Suggestion from my end are

• Try and accommodate a view having the Calendar as a Tab in the Mail Folder
• Try and give it a better looking theme if possible same as the Sunbird Cal Project
• I disabled the Sunbird Cal and took backup of that ICS file and created a new Local Calendar on Lightning and Imported the Data from the backup file.Import went well but when you try and edit the New Cal to find the location it shows MozProfile id=2.Is it possible to create a default folder for the calendar file in Lightning
• Notes
• Rest i think you have built a correct roadmap for features.

Best of Luck Thanks once again. Chaitanya

--- As the Product Manager for an application that adds Infuzer powered events and itineraries directly into electronic calendars without the need to cut and paste or type anything(currently Outlook, Lotus Notes and Palm Desktop), I am charged with keeping up with the pulse of consumer demand for supporting new platforms. If I make a case for it, I can pressure our developers to start the process of supporting this project. Let me know if this type of convenience feature is important to all of you. Additionally, sports schedules, public holidays and weather are also "events" that can be added in a single click.

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We need more visibility about this project, a lot of sys admin (like me) are looking to Mozilla Lightning in order to replace their Exchange/Outlook solution. We need an official full description of functionalities and a clear roadmap (what will really be available mid-2005 ?). Please save us from a new couple of years with Outlook/Exchange !

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What about another tab for contacts?

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The tabs idea is a great one. The natural extension to take it beyond what outlook can do is to allow the user to customize their own tab(s) in addition. This provides for customized primary tab (think Outlook Today page) which would aggregate info. The user could customize that page and/or add their own tab with whatever widgets they would like. As I see this in my mind I'd have a widget displaying the 10 newest email, top 10 lines from todo list (w/ a 'quick add' line), a 2 week view and an rss feed for the weather and another rss feed for whatever. The possibilities are endless.

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I've been loving using Lightning through the last two release candidates and .1. It's definitely going to help with my workplace productivity.

I'd really like to see another way to access the events you have in the calender - an Event Summary or if it were in the Calender menu bar an 'Event View' (below the existing Day/Week/Month views) which displayed events collated into one page - a summary of what events exist in your calender. Sometimes it would just be good to be able to see all events, for example if you need to make a change to more than one event with minimal hunting around for them.

If you could see them summarised in columns analogous to TB's handling of emails currently, so you could order them by Title/Location/Start time/Calender/Category by clicking on the top bar it could be pretty useful I believe. A way to see lots of events sorted however you wanted rather than the current (and quite correctly - it is a calender after all) chronologically organised event displays.

Might need two resizeable panes - one at the top for Events and one at the bottom for ToDo's?

By way of an example to how this could make Lightning more useful, it could be seen as a 'yellow pages' to the current calenders 'white pages'. For example if you were on the phone to a friend and wanted to check whether you had their birthday noted, you could click on Event view and sort by Category to see all your friend's birthdays noted in one place.

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I think it would be a minor bit of work, but it would be nice to make the Thunderbird start page show upcoming events, tasks, etc. That way, when Thunderbird starts, you can often find what you need at a glance. I use a calendar mostly for reminders, as I'm a very forgetful person, so it's easy for me to forget to check what is going on during a given day = )

Devs, isn't this already possible? To put the Location of "Go to today" in the "Thunderbird start page" under General Preferences? What would be the URL??

People have been asking for this for years. So far (2010) it appears to be a no-go.

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Nice to be able to "Banner" or Box an event which extends over a series of days, e.g. vacation, so it would appear as one long event with only one label.

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Delayed Sending

In order to achieve professional usability of Mozilla, delayed sending of emails by using date/time of a Calender dropdown (similar to Outlook) should be included.

Actually this feature should appear on a 'most wanted' list.

brgds Manfred

Exchange replacement

I have removed Exchange and replace it with Linux running Cyrus IMAP, Postfix SMTP, Amavisd-new, Spamassassin, ClamAV and OpenLDAP, but the lack of Calendaring is a problem.

Most of my users don't want to work in a web interface (but they do want it available when they are out of the office) Thunderbird with Lightning may be the missing piece of the jigsaw.

Thunderbird / Lightning needs to have an interface to the Cyrus sieve server rules (at the moment we use a webmail plugin to manage the rules).

It also needs to have a Calendar with the ability to view other users calendars and send / receive meeting requests.

A server based address book (LDAP or SQL) so that my contacts are available in Thunderbird / Lightning and Webmail would be great.

Actually, your mentioning SQL makes good sense. Why not just use an SQL based database server for calendar and contacts? Think about it:

1. Built for speedy data access (reliable data indexing, etc.)
2. Built for multiple simultaneous users from the ground up
3. Standards compliant (ANSI SQL) (could be fueled by Interbase/firebird, MySql, PostgreSQL, Oracle or SQL Server)
4. Anyone could build a web interface, or you could even use the existing scheme for a web based calendar like Horde 3 or e-groupware giving users web based access right off the bat!

Also consider using WebCalendar for the server. WebCalendar supports MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server and others on the server-side. It was primarily a web-based calendar UI but can now also be used with iCal-compliant apps like Lightning.

Consider kolab groupware server. It does all the above, uses IMAP to store the calendar information. Kolab supports outlook already, as well as clients running on linux and kolab comes with a webinterface.

Tablet PC Integration

I've been looking for a good place for tablet integration inside of the mozilla products. Task management, notes and calendaring, integrated with email/rss would be the perfect home for Ink support. See OneNote and FranklinCovey TabletPlanner

-Andrew

I wholeheartedly second this! There would be an absolutely HUGE leap to Thunderbird from the tablet pc community if this were to happen. See TabletCalendar.. (which I purchased)http://www.comcul.com/software/tabletpc/calendar.html

This inside of Lightning would be a knockout!

-Chad

Making Task Management more Collaborative

The biggest limitation for Outlook / task management applications is their myopic, user centric focus. This may sound a bit misguided since the calendaring being discussed is "my" calendar, but hear me out.

Collaborative task management is the primary focus of what many of us do for a living. Get this done by making sure he finishes this; make sure she does that, etc. Within the discussion for Lightning (that I've seen), the focus is on my managing what I've done by actively adjusting the list AND communicating separately surrounding the tasks. If I want Bill to finish something that I had originally placed on my to-do list, I will need to revise the original to-do so that it incorporates the revisions (assigned to Bill, follow up by date, check status on this date, etc.) and I will need to communicate the changes to Bill. This should happen more seamlessly.

The functionality I'm suggesting is a combination of Outlook and Project, incorporated into the email project. Basecamp is an excellent example of the elegant simplicity that task management can be...integrated into a mail/calendar app it would add amazing leverage. If the systems were indeed used as an exchange replacement with a SQL db, centralized management should be available.

With a centralized management, repeatable functional tasks could be templated and assigned quickly (See basecamp example). Beyond basecamp functionality, tasks could interplay with messages to re-assign, elevate, note exception while continuously showing status to the access group. This notion will require administrative functionality for management of access levels and participation, but shouldn't be too difficult.

If distributed is the primary structure, then an integration of mail and task to record assignment, completion, acceptance, etc. would still be a valuable part of the calendaring ability.

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I can only forward this point: besides the desirable use of such a feature in a business environment as described above, I can also imagine lots of use in private life eg organizing family reunions, weddings, anniversaries, vacations also. But even in my everyday personal routine, most decisions I make involve other persons and feedback from them, most of which is done using the mobile phone, unfortunately leading to high bills. This feature could be a huge problem solver. Keep up the good work!

Printing Capabilities

I've used the calendar tools under the Common Desktop Environment as well as Lotus Notes and another one I can't remember. There are some things I really want from a calendar tool and I haven't seen one that does a good job of it all.

First, what I want is to be able to program in recurring meetings and other events. Then I want to print the calendar for the month out on large paper, like legal-size or executive. From there I pencil-in things as they come up, and I use the blank days before the first day of the month and after the last day of the month to write in general items that don't happen on a particular day.

This is useful to me because I can use my hardcopy calendar without having to constantly interact with a computer. As new recurring events come up, I program them in and run off the next month's calendar when I need it. This may sound kind of stone-age to some of you palm-pilot etc. users but there may be others who like hardcopy calendars but would like to be able to program in recurring events.

The main thing is that I'd like to ask for some features in the calendar tool that probably aren't hard to implement, you just may not have thought of them because you use the tool differently than I do. Here goes:

1. Be able to print to letter, legal, and executive-size paper. The edges of the calendar rectangle should fit close to the edges of the paper, so printing to larger paper will give larger boxes for each day of the month, and give more room for event information, whether printed automatically or penciled-in on the hardcopy.
2. Use small enough font that the printed calendar can fit maybe 8 events per day with 2-3 lines of description per event, like time, title, location, and call-in number. All these details need to be printed, although the online calendar could contain other fields of information that don't print out.
3. Rescale the size of the calendar for months that span 4 or 5 weeks on a Sunday-to-Saturday layout. Also, when printing a full month, leave the boxes empty that precede the 1st day and that follow the last day of the month.

That's really all I'd have to ask for. To me it seems strange that so many of the tools I've seen do things like print different weeks with different sized boxes, or leave huge margins and not have enough room in the boxes for any information, or use a huge font so only the times show up and not the names of the events.

Hope you're interested, thanks. -- Carl Ponder

Follow-up: I'm looking at the Mozilla Calendar Tool that plugs into the Thunderbird mail-system. Here are the problems with the print capability:

1. First, the calendar doesn't go to the printer, you just get a viewable calendar that doesn't have any provision to print. That said, what follows are the formatting issues...
2. The descriptions of the events are not well formatted. It may mean well by aligning the text separately from the event time, but this means a lot of wasted whitespace and one event takes 7 lines to describe and fills the whole day's box. This should all wrap around into about 3 contiguous lines.
3. The margins are much too wide. The calendar grid needs to be expanded a *lot*. There would be room for more events-per-day if item #2 were corrected and the daily boxes were made bigger by shrinking the margins.
4. Finally, the viewable calendar is shown in "portrait" mode, so only the top 2/3 of the page are filled. The layout needs to be *landscape* for a month view -- because you have 7 days times 4-5 weeks, it's natural that the grid should be wider then it is high.

I don't know whether "Lightning" is starting with the same code-base as this.... -- Carl Ponder

• As it says in the documentation, Lightning is NOT starting from the same code-base.

• I would like to digress a little on what kind of "printing capabilities" I would like to see from Lightning. In Outlook 2003 I typically print out my entire day in color with two smaller frames on the right that include my tasks and room for notes. Lightning should be able to approximate this view for me to be truly happy with a switch. Also, I love to save paper by printing two days at a time with a Landscape orientation. -Patrick Ryan

• As mentioned above, some other formats would be really handy. I'm thinking of the stuff the paper pased hPDA (Hipster) folks are coming up with (www.diyplanner.com) Things like, 3x5 cards, Business and smaller cards, half sheets of paper, adding notes areas and custom graphics. Maybe there should just be an easy way (and a dummies guide) to making your own print templates.

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I have just switched over to Lightning from the Mozilla Calendar Extension, and I *do* like the look and feel!

I was disappointed to note that I am unable to view a list of events and I don't have the printing options I had in the MCE. I would LOVE to be able to select events from my various calendars and print a calendar format with events listed on each date box, and then also print an events list, with all the details included.

I see that I can export a calendar to HTML format, and I like the layout of that. However, I am not given an option for a date range, so it prints out whatever's in the calendar. If those are recurring events, it just prints the first one. (This was also an issue in MCE.) I want to be able to select all the events in, say, November 2006, and have it print a list of the events that appear there with the November date, not with the February date when the original recurring event was created.

Thanks so much for all you do!

Shan Carter (10/21/2006)

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Printing of Tasks

How about the ability to print selected / open Tasks?

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Interlinking

Lotus Organizer (the mother of all PIMs, and even now still the best) uses a Filofax(tm) metaphor for the user interface. There are colored tabs along the side (Calendar, Contacts, ToDo, Calls, Anniversaries, Web Links/Logins, Planner, Notepad).

Within this is an excellent feature allowing interlinking of calendar, contacts, notes, ToDo's, etc by clicking on a chain-link icon and then on the two items to link together (e.g., a contact and a phone call to that contact). The linked items then both showed a chain symbol on them which acted as a hyperlink between them. Each item could be linked to any number of others. Only one chain-link is ever shown. Clicking on a chain-link reveals a menu with a list of all hyperlinked targets (and arrows that reveal subsequent links from that target).

Note: "(8)" below is a chain-link icon

[Contact: Mr. Smith](8)[Call: Mr. Smith 2007-12-24      >][Call: Ms. Smith 2007-01-01]
                       [Call: Mr. Smith 2007-12-24      >]
                       [Anniversary: Mr. Smith 2007-02-29]

Clicking on a hyperlink takes you to that item.

This was the most useful feature I have ever found in one of the organiser type products, but I have never seen this in any product since.

"Project ID" for Each Entry

Lotus Organizer (the mother of all PIMs, and even now still the best) lets the user assign a Project ID (they call it "Customer Code") to each entry. This allows the user to group separate items into projects. So a set of appointments, calls, and contacts could all have the Project ID for a given project (e.g., ID = "Firefox Fall 2008 activities"). Then the user could filter on that ID to see only the entries for that project (or group of activities).

Comments:

(anonymous said) How about the following:

I get an email from my boss, she wants me to start a project that will require me to communicate via email with various others, sending documents, establishing meetings, and completing certain tasks. [--PeterLairo 14:30, 4 March 2008 (PST): this would be better dealt with using a "Project Number" for each calendar entry, and then having the ability to filter on any Project No]

If I could do a right-click on the email message and create a 'Project - Label: Boss's Important Thing' then I could tag any other emails regarding this project and have a sort of filing mechanism. Then, as I add todo's to my list, add meetings, etc, I would tag them with this particular project. Then in a 'Project Tab' I could click on that project and see all relevant information.

This could also be done by my suggestion under "Shared Calendar Functionality" about creating a local calendar with an associated list of emails that would be notified of any changes to the calendar. In this case, you would have a calendar called "Boss's Important Thing", much simpler than having to tag events with a project name. It would also give you the added convenience of automatically updating everyone else's calendar when you add todo's and meetings. --MHall

(anonymous said) It's something that's been bugging me a lot recently. I often get an email that I know I will need to deal with at some future date, but don't want to worry about now. What I want to be able to do is to create a calendar entry and alarm from that email, so that when the alarm goes I can immediately find the details in the email. It would also be handy to be able to link/embed other documents that are relevant to the task in the calendar entry.

The "send to..." metaphor could perhaps be used?

Auto-detect Dates in email

A very useful Thunderbird/Lightning feature would be an extension in Thunderbird that auto-detects dates and times (any reasonable syntax) in the body of an email and highlights them so with a right click they can go straight to the calendar. (email subject becomes default title of appointment). My ipod version of mail can do it and it helps a lot (even if it is not working perfectly).

Also all dates found in a email could become linked for a calendar lookup. When you hover over the link, a menu appears and shows any events you have that day as well as an option to add a new event to that date.

eg. these two options would appear in the right click menu

• add new calendar item
• view calendar dd/mm/yy

Import/Export to/from XML

This would be nice, for example, for exporting/importing to/from a personal website etc (along with contact details).

And automatically! For instance, on startup import and closing export or every hour, etc.

I see this being important, like in my instance, for using a personal calendar on my work computer and home computer.

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I'm new to this forum, so I'm not very sure about the protocols and for that I apologize. Kindly correct me if needed.

I've developed a small converter for converting the HTML files exported from Lightning to iCal format which can be imported back. I would like it to freely available to anyone who needs it. What should I do? Can someone guide me?

Thanks.

Ajith Sen

hCalendar publish and subscribe support

The iCal.app client on MacOSX has the ability to publish a calendar on a web page (using really bad markup), and subscribe to an ics file. This support though quite minimal/quirky is still useful.

What would work well in today's web-centric world is the ability to publish your calendar (or a subset thereof, perhaps filtering by a 'tag'?) on the Web in hCalendar, along with the venue/location as an hCard, and hCards for the organizer and any attendees as well.

In addition, if you browse a page in Mozilla/Firefox that happens to have hCalendar events on it, or a feed in Thunderbird that has hCalendar events in it, it would be great if you could either (a) copy the event to your personal calendar or (b) subscribe to the URL with the hCalendar events and have the events show up as a dynamic calendar inside your personal calendar.

Currently this works with hCalendar (and hCard for that matter, same as above, just s/personal calendar/personal addressbook) via a proxy that transforms the hCalendar/hCard to iCalendar/vCard, and favelets/bookmarklets that do the Copy/Subscribe operation. It would be much better to skip the proxy step, and just parse the hCalendars/hCards directly and into the calendaring/addressbook app.

Contact - Define Relationships

Between contacts relationships should be definable, e.g. brother, mother, spouse. In case of an address change an option list with all contacts at the same address should appear where a selection of the concerned items can be checked.

Take a look at XFN for a set of common relationships that people publish on the web.

Netmanage Ecco

It seems like a lot of interesting things are converging here. I had been looking for a good powerful PIM to use instead of Outlook or Palm Desktop and discovered Ecco Pro from Netmanage which was free for download; but still closed source. Now that I have been using it for a while, I have really came to appreciate it; but wish it had email capabilities. Then I downloaded Firebird to start playing with it. Then I discovered last month that Netmanage was about to release the Ecco code as Open Source (probably under GPL). Now this week, I find out about Lightning. Has anyone in the Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning community thought about utilizing some of the Ecco functionality or building API's or tie-ins between the two. It seems like a golden opportunity. Ecco won a ton of awards as the best PIM out there before it was killed off by bundled Outlook.

Not sure how to contribute to this person's comments on Ecco which was created by Arabesque and then bought by Netmanage. Ten years after Netmanage couldn't figure out how to carve out a niche when Outlook was bundled with Office, Ecco is still the most powerful and innovative PIM out there. In fact, Outlook killed off the PIM category, which is reason all by itself to resist Microsoft at every turn. I heartily endorse the idea that the Mozilla team should figure out how to take the now open source code that Netmanage finally made available (about a decade later than it needed to) and work with it in Sunbird and/or Lightning. Just as an aside I'm having trouble understanding why there isn't any linkage between Sunbird and Lightning. Why can't I work in one and the product show up in the other. But the important point is that the person I'm responding to hits the nail smack on the head. Anyone who has ever used ECCO feels there just this big void in the tools at his or her disposal in terms of calendaring and all the other PIM functions one needs to organize work and life. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could rediscover those under the Mozilla umbrella!!??

Calendar - Right-click to set as wallpaper based on resolution.

After using Sunbird more and more I was thinking if it would be possible to add an option when right-clicking on the Calendar itself that would allow you to set it as your wallpaper automatically rendered to the current resolution. I was also told on IRC that it should update therefore I would think option in the options menu itself to "Set calendar as wallpaper on exit" would be appropriate to accommodate this new "wallpaper" function. Does this sound like something very useful and convenient only to me or others too?

Taicho

Email + Calendar Synergisms

I think there are a couple of features where the tight integration of email and calender would allow new features that would immensely benefit users who have to work a lot with email and with a lot of emails.

For instance in a setting where you work for several projects and many of the hundreds of emails you get per week require follow-up actions it is extremely hard no to find out which emails are still relevant, which actions to do based on which emails, and until when to do them.

It would be great to be able to associate information about follow-up actions and deadlines with emails. Emails could be grouped, color-coded, filtered depending on whether there are still uncompleted follow up actions or missed deadlines. Deadlines could automatically show up in the calendar and there could be links to relevant emails.

There should also be much more possibilities to group emails and assign arbitrary keywords and notes. It should be possible that emails show up in several folders depending on the assigned labels (similar to Gmail).

The possibility to attach notes and todo lists would make it easy to keep track of what has been done and still needs to be done for an email or a group of emails (a thread).

There are many additional things that would make sense to provide, simply based on how people would *like* and *need* to work when email and deadlines are an important part of their daily work.

This project would be an excellent chance to make this killer application a reality -- I do not know any program that really offers this in a well designed manner. TB/Lightning could be the first. Johann_P 15:13, 25 Sep 2005 (PDT)

Wow, this is one of the most innovative ideas I've heard yet. Imagine being able to group relevant emails and tasks under a single calendar event, or emails and events under a single task, or even events and tasks under a single email? Looking at the calendar screen for an event, "Big Important Meeting", would list all of the emails you have received concerning that event, and all of the todo tasks required for that event, along with their current status. Add task dependencies and a gantt chart and suddenly Thunderbird becomes a complete collaborative planning environment. Does something of this magnitude even belong in an email client? Maybe this should be created as a separate project, and XUL based planner that integrates with Thunderbird/Sunbird? --MHall

I would like to add a suggestion as another SAH Mom. I am really excited about this software and it's potential. I am in the process of implementing Sunbird as a family organizer. I would really like to see the lightning project succeed so that I can have all my information in one application and easy to get to without a lot of time surfing around. A few things I would like to request are;

1. the ability to change font style and color in calendar view 2. the ability to customize the task view - maybe by being able to show only certain categories by selecting them from a list, color coding tasks or have separate folder tabs for different lists (ie. I use my tasks to make a shopping list as well as movies I want to see and books I want to read or things needed for the house and a daily to do list - you can see that having all of these lists displayed at the same time is quite distracting)

Other than that I am really impressed with Sunbird and Thunderbird (I especially like the look and the color coded calendars). Thank you for providing a very useful tool - It is just what I was looking for.

Thanks, Mandi Gottfredson

--- Currently working on -> Journal - Project management

It would be helpful to track the use of time and resources with a "currently working on" option in the Task window that automatically fills in the time used for a specific task and files an event in the calendar. This way one can easily review where the time has gone and why. It might also be used to suppress e-mail reminders with normal priorities during a work on high priority tasks, etc. In the end it is time that the users get hands on their own time/task management so that procrastination and misjudgment can be tackled privately - so that we can have more fun in the end. P-) With a further step towards tasks+subtasks a project management structure might be the next big step (after implementing calendaring functions)!

Auto - email-task It is quite common that an e-mail triggers a response that cannot be immediately be resolved. Dragging it to a task should give an option to connect it with an answer that is directly accessible via the task. This should be a link to the drafts folder so that it can be continuously worked upon. Sending of the e-mail would complete the task automatically.

BoP

Free-Busy address

Would be nice to have the possibility to generate a web page on a website or ftp server that would be used as a Free-Busy URL. Like an online place where your contacts who want to send you meeting request could check if you are available at that time/date.

automatic alarms

This may be obvious, but since I didn't find it discussed anywhere, I thought I'd mention it. Most full bloated, I mean full blown, email apps with calendars can have alarms go off by just opening the email app (as opposed to specifically viewing/opening the calendar). I've missed some alarms set in the Calendar Thunderbird extension because I didn't launch the calendar after launching Thunderbird. Will this be a feature from the lightning project?

Jason

Calendar as wallpaper

What I would really like is to get a calendar view (week, day or month) displayed as wallpaper for my desktop. I am not sure how that can be implemented but would be nice.

Other thing, I think it would be nice to be able to delete only one event in a recurring event series without deleting the whole series. Let say I have weekly meetings always at the same time, but I am sometimes going on vacations and need to delete the ones during the vacation period.

Last thing, I think it might be nice if the calendar could open on a view previously defined by the user, or something like the last view. I find it nice when it opens in week view, and would like to keep it like this when it opens rather than changing back the view every time.

I forgot to add: This is a great project. i am checking these pages regularly and waiting impatiently for the release.

Calendar as a separate window

I like to have the Calendar in a separate window from the Thunderbird mailer. I noticed this was not the case with the nightly builds I downloaded 2/27/06. My already crowded window had the calendar filling the lower left-hand corner and I didn't see an option to pull it up as its own window. Is there a way? Or is there planned to be one?

I expected Lightning to integrate with Thunderbird in the sense that the Lightning window would import/modify calendar-entries based on .ics attachments on the messages. Does Sunbird have (or plan to have) a capability for Thunderbird to pass .ics attachments directly, instead of me having to save and import the attachment each time?

Another possibility not mentioned here would be for Lightning to be linked to Sunbird. I don't understand the point of taking up space in an email client for calendaring if you've already got a calendar program.

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I too would like to see Lightning able to open in a separate top level window. I have been using Thunderbird with the Lightning Calendar Extension for half a year now, and it is works really well, however I find often that I would like to look at the calendar but have to first click through the email part of Thunderbird. This takes time which makes me more hesitant to view the calendar than if I was able to click straight to it. It would be great if it could be separate like Sunbird but with the same capability to sync with Thunderbird and emails.

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Try this tip here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=811495

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I was using Sunbird as a diary since 2007. With a move to Ubuntu 12.04 in 2012, Lightning to be better supported, so I installed the plugin and spent a few hours migrating the data over. I still miss having the Calendar show up as separate item in the windows list in Gnome Classic. The Mozillazine tip on a calendar associated with a mailbox may not apply for me, because I don't sync that diary anywhere.

Is there a symbolic link that could be created that will launch just the calendar window (and not the inboxes)?

Birthdays & Address Book

I certainly think it would be useful if birthdays could be connected with members of your address book(s). I have often thought that this was the most-required addition to the card. A nice touch would then be to have the age calculated automatically and optionally shown in the calendar, perhaps with a special reminder if the contact reaches a special age like 16,21 or 50 etc.. The calendar application should also be able to make an birthday and then browse through a contact list (Thunderbird or other).

Phil says: I second that. It would REALLY be nice to have birthdays attached to contacts and automatically inserted in the calendar.

Email dates calendar tooltips

Zimbra (http://zimbra.com) has a very nice features that adds a tooltips over date keywords (today, tomorrow, 03/15/2006) with the events for that date item. A tight integration should definitely feature something similar ! (you can see the demo of that feature on http://www.zimbra.com in the demo section)

Deleting events from the Agenda

It would be handy to be able to right-click on events in the Agenda tab and edit and/or delete them. jminta: You can edit events by double clicking on them. Deleting via the delete key would probably be a nice addition, too, with or without a context menu.

Calendar layout positioning

Really like this calendar, but a couple of things...

As some else pointed out,a chunk of real-estate disappears in the lower left of TB (depending upon the layout I assume). Interestingly, this appears to be changeable only it's height, to the point where it will disappear (nice), and re-appear when dragged back up (not bad). The calendar is otherwise unmovable.

It would be great thing if it could be re-positioned, or if there was some kind of tabbed arrangement so that one could change between calendar and mail-folder views with a single click (or CTRL-Tab). Incidentally, this would also be nice to have with FF sidebars as well, so multiple sidebars could be open at once.

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What I would like to see is for the calender (and the address book, too, but that's another matter) to integrate into the folder pane (similar to Outlook's "folder list" view). The calendar sidebar wouldn't be visible at all most of the time then, but when you select the calendar entry in the folder pane, both the sidebar and the main calendar would open.

Oh, and I much prefer the Sunbird layout with the event list on top of the calendar instead of on the sidebar (the sidebar could be shrinked down to just the overview calender)

Calendar app nice but hides folders

I have had TBird for awhile but using fulltime recently.

Calendar app nice but hides folders.

Unfortunately, this is the 'combination of bad features' problem

TB has very poor folders navigation features (no goto, no radio box).

This calendar app buries the folders list completely -when message preview (F8) is on -which mine always is in whatever email client I am using.

I set up filters - to TB's "Local Folders", I reset my Inbox to local Folders. Still no view of - Local Folders.

Because of this app.

I finally hit upon the idea of mouse-dragging the left window border - and voila! The word Folders. Then F8 and - voila! the folders' view/list.

I looked for an "x" box to delete/dismiss the calendar view -NONE. Looked in the Calendar menu for "close" -NONE. Unchecked the "Home" selection under calendar - ineffective.

This is a very nice app, well written (works, didn't crash) but a close button is a necessity - as well as readme info that discloses TB's dearth (poverty) of Folder viewing options. (wish I knew of a way to add a "folders" button to TB customized toolbars).

- BG 03/23/06

Date format

Currently, in the day and week views, the date is shown in the format m/d (e.g. 5/15). Users need to be able to change this to the d/m format used in many other countries.

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It would also be nice if the time could be formatted in 12 hour mode instead of just 24.

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It would also be nice to be able to control the display: right now, in Lightning, my display is thoroughly inconsistent and there don't seem to be any preference controls. The time is displayed on the weekly calendar is in 24-hour format, but the display of times for appointments is in 12hr + AM/PM format. I'd prefer to be able to control this, but failing that it should all be the same!

Does not work Lotus Notes .ICS attachment meeting invitations

I connect with Thunderbird 1.5 to the Lotus Notes via IMAP. Email works fine.

After installing lighting extension, it shows a nice calendar window, and when I receive a meeting invitation from someone with an attached .ICS file, it now parses it and shows the invitation like so:

Invitation from Whoever Topic: Whatever Start: 02:30:00 PM End: 04:00:00 PM [Accept] [Decline]

Now the first problem is that it only shows the times and not a date in the start/end.

2nd is that when I click the [Accept] button then it shows a dialog with the following message:

"An external application must be launched to handle moz-cal-handle-itip: links: Requested link: ...<entire .ICS file url-encoded> ..."

The dialog does not have either OK or Cancel button, and is the width of the screen.

If I press Enter in the dialog, dialog disappears, but the meeting is not added to my calendar.

ssitter 01:13, 8 June 2006 (PDT): It is not intended to work at the moment. See Lightning 0.1 Release Notes: True email/calendar integration is planned, but that is not part of this release. If you want to report a bug see Calendar:QA_Home, if you want support try the official forum.

Alarm Reminders by Email

Help: I want Lightning to send an email reminder to me, and I cannot figure out how. It's not explicit in the documentation whether or not that is supposed to be a feature. Can someone tell me how to do it?

Snooze and Custom Reminder Options

Kudos on the Lightning project! As a Mac iCal user, I'm excited to find suitable calendar functionality with Thunderbird! My Mac's been dead for 2 months and have been lost without iCal.. now Lightning imported my backup iCal .ics file w/no problems!

A couple of requests for the list of future features... Calendar reminders are a must for me:

1.) When clicking a popup reminder, please give an option to Snooze with a dropdown of common times and a custom field.

2.) For reminders that need repeated for say: 1st Tuesday of each month.. I couldn't find this option. When I imported my iCal .ics file, it placed the numbers 10,23,29 in the "Repeat on the" recurrence field - any info on what these three sets of numbers mean?

Thanks for all your work!!! By all means and purposes, Lightning is working for my needs as is.

-- Edit --

I see that 10,23,29 does repeat the event on that day of each month. Thanks again for the great work!

--EDIT --

For #1 above, I'm used to 2 hour, 4 hour, 8 hour, as well as 1, 2, 4 day snoozes. Would love to see those added in.

-- EDIT -- For #1 above, ideally the pre-set "common" snooze durations would be common to the user, either as specified in preferences or dynamically determined from the user's history of custom and pre-set snooze duration choices.

-- EDIT (freefal67) -- I wanted to second the feature request for email reminders. For people who are mobile and check email in different places, this would be a great feature, since they don't have to worry they'll forget an event because they weren't in front of the computer where they entered the event.

-- EDIT (--DonGato 08:05, 10 April 2007 (PDT)) --

I would like option 1 implemented as current offered times are not useful for me.

-- EDIT -- As in option 1 I would also like to be able to customize the reminder time.

-- EDIT -- Please add me to the list of people REALLY needing the EMAIL reminder. This was an excellent add-on feature of Mozilla suite that I used extensively, both for self-mailing and to others, including mail lists. I really hope that this function can be added. Dave Shiffman, Memphis TN

-- EDIT -- I have been wondering how to setup e-mail reminders with Lightning. I can see that it is an option under "custom' reminders, but I have no way of actually activating it. For me e-mail reminders are fundamental. Any tips? If this feature is not available yet, I would very strongly encourage adding it. Albert Guillen i Fabregas, Cambridge, UK

-- EDIT --Bdunnette 06:56, 8 May 2008 (PDT) As a slight tweak to the reminders, I'd like to see some of the less-exact snooze times used by other calendars like MS Entourage (e.g. "End of today", "First thing tomorrow", etc.)

-- EDIT -- Currently, reminders do not show up again if Thunderbird is closed and reopened. The reminders should stay active until dismissed, and they should pop-up again if the program is closed and reopened. Additionally, there has to be a way to prevent reminders associated with internet calendars from reopening every time that the calendars refresh.

Support Drag-n-Drop

One of the things that blocked me to give up Outlook is that I can drag an email to the "calendar" folder, and it will automatically trigger an event window to let me set the detailed date and reminder stuff(the email title and body are mapped to event title and content). And this really makes things easier.

--LLM 19:41, 7 December 2009 (UTC) Thunderbird 3.0 supports this by right-clicking on message, and select Convert To... and then you can turn the message into either a Calendar Event or a Task.

Event identification

I would to share a few ideas for improvement of Lightning:

2) In the Month View Left Pane (below local folders), dates with certain category of events could be bold (or color) faced so that one can easily identify important meetings or holidays/vacations.

3) I don't know if this a specific problem for my language (Brazilian Portuguese), but, in Month View Left Pane, I see months and week days in Portuguese, while in the Main Month View (Right Pane), I see months and week days in English.

4) Maybe another specific problem, but I wasn't able to import a Calendar ICS file (BrasilHolidays.ics) from Calendar/Import. It gives me an error message (28 items failed to import. The last error was: 2147500037). On the other hand, I get to Create a New Remote Calendar for http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/caldata/BrasilHolidays.ics . However, although it appears in my calendars list (as BrasilHolidays), no event appears in the calendar view (in Calendar extension, it woks fine).

Thank you for great softwares (Thunderbird/Firefox/Lightning).

Email/Calendar Tagging

I would be a major plus if we could tag (like del.icio.us) our emails and tasks (for example: "boss; letter; funding; budget").

That way, we could have email/tasks sorted by tags, having them relate easily. I've been using Windows Vista, and this is what it's now done with the Photo Gallery, kind of like Picasa, but a "lot" better! (MS did it pretty nicely this time... and emails can be tagged as well... Tags have now entered the MS spectrum, as they are conquering the... web 2.0)

Daily alarm w/o calendar item

I haven't seen any calendar programs that do this (or I haven't figured it out), but I'd like to set up a daily alarm that is NOT a calendar item. For example, I take medications daily, and I'd like a reminder to go off at the same time every day. But I don't want to put a 1 minute calendar event - that just adds unnecessarily to the calendar. I just need an alarm to go off every day at the same time. Thanks.

This is already possible. Create a new calendar. Create a (repeating) calendar item with alarm, and place it in the new calendar. Unselect the calendar, which removes it from view, but the alarms will still popup. Ready. --Thekk 09:00, 11 March 2007 (PDT)

Lightning Calendar - Can you adjust time scale?

I was just curious if anyone knows how to adjust time scale on Lightning. Mine defaults to 8am the first time I select on day or week view, however if I then view my email and go back to these views, it defaults to 12am. I would prefer just to set my own parameters (say from 8am-6pm) since I'm not usually using the calendar in the middle of the night.

Maybe this could be an enhancement? mattdick@yahoo.com

--> Matt, try Edit-Preferences-Lightning. Under the Views tab, there's a "Day and Weeks View" section. Specify your day start/end time here and the number of hours to display. That should work.

x86_64 version

This would make me very happy. I believe there were 64bit versions in the past

Jamierc 13:35, 12 April 2007 (PDT)

Compiling from source code

If you would like to compile from source code, see here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/build.html

Context menus

I really like Lightning. Good work, and the best is going to come. I'd really appreciate powered context menus to enable fast movements through dates. For example, "view day" in month and week view, and "view week" in month view.

Time shift by 1 hour in calendar

I have just started using Lightning but the time I insert in calendar items shows up on the calendar as an hour later -- eg a 10:00am item displays as 11:00am. My time zone is Sydney Australia and, being winter here, Vista has set daylight saving to off. Any suggestions?

I have the same problem but mine shifts by 2 hr. I'm also in Sydney and using XP instead of vista. I have the same problem in both Sunbird and Lightning --shp 13:42, 16 February 2008 (PST)

I just downloaded and began using the latest T-bird and Lightning, and I am seeing a two-hour negative shift (8 AM becomes 6 AM) for every manual entry. Entries imported from Mozilla 7.13 display normally. Dave Shiffman in Memphis TN (US-CDT)

Event/Task Attachments

Not sure if I am missing something obvious, but can we attach a document to events or tasks? I see the link option, but seems that it is only a URL link.

Thanks!

shortcut key for new task

It appears that there is no shortcut key for "New Task" in Lightning. There is one in Sunbird (ctrl+T) but obviously it conflicts with Thunderbird's shortcut for "Get New Messages," so another shortcut key needs to be designated.

Ideally users should be able to customize their own shortcut keys for all functions (does this deserve its own topic?).

--> In both the Calendar view and Mail view, try (Ctrl+D) to open the New Task window.

Today Pane

The today pane is a great new feature in the latest Lightning! Having the basic current calendar items visible in the Mail window is a step up toward prime-time (v. 1.0?).

Only one one feature that seems strange. If I choose not to hide completed tasks, then the events pane lists every task I've ever entered to date as an event for TODAY. I can't hide them in the event pane without hiding them in the task pane as well. I tried switching to show only events in the event pane but it reverts to both events and tasks each time I start Thunderbird.

Am I missing something, or was this just an oversight?

--

I think it would be useful to add the category and/or category color to the Today Pane (perhaps as background color?).

Confirmation/rejection of ICS invitations

I cannot reveal an opportunity to tell Lightning to send a confirmation/rejection mail to an invitation. If there is one, pls. tell me. Otherwise this should be an important feature for future releases to use Lightning in professional environments. Thanks.

Launch Calendar Reminders

The only time the Reminders dialog displays is when Thunderbird starts. I'd like to redisplay the un-dismissed reminders later, after closing the dialog. If there is a trigger in the interface, I haven't been able to find it.

Appointments out of view

When an appointment is set and saved in the early morning or late evening, the event moves out of view of the main window. Is it possible for example to ad a small up or down arrow to indicate that there are appointments out of sight from the main window? I don't want to set my view to display all hours in a day.

Unable to click very short appointments

When I have set an appointment with short duration, say 15 minutes, it is very hard to click and edit. Even if you only display a couple of hours per day. It would be easy if an appointment would "unfold" on mouse-over.

Allow operations on future occurrences of repeating items

When editing a repeating item, you are given a choice to edit "All occurrences" or "This occurrence only". Often what you want to do is edit all future occurrences. For example, a standing meeting changes to a new hour. You want to update the meetings that didn't happen yet and not screw up the history of where you were in the past.

Alternatively, if one wishes to only edit "This occurrence only" like cancel the present meeting but not the future ones, it does not send emails to the invites or stand canceled in their calendar.

Automated Tasks Using Email Rules

How about the ability to create and complete tasks automatically using email rules. Within the Message Filters section of Thunderbird, a user should be able to create a task with a given name and possibly assign a due date for that task. Within that same screen, the user should be able to set a task with a given name as complete if a specific email is received.

As an example, Discover sends me an email stating that my monthly statement is ready for viewing. I've previously created a filter which recognizes the email and creates a rule to "Pay Discover Card Bill" with a due date 3 weeks from the date of the email. Within the task would be a link to the email that generated it. After I get around to paying my bill, I receive a confirmation email that is recognized to checks my active tasks and mark a "Pay Discover Card Bill" task as complete. --RCornelius 21:27, 22 May 2008 (PDT)

Daylight Savings

Australia/Perth has just jumped into Daylight Savings Time and we've jumped forward an hour, but the timezones in Lightning don't seem to recognise it, nor does it follow the system time(?). Wondering if anything can be done about this. For now, I've had to change the timezone to Japan/Tokyo.

--Antzpantz 01:26, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

This might be a bug or something... why does Lightning not rely on the Windows System Time? My Lightning Timezone is set on Australia/Perth, but we recently went through Daylight Savings moving our clocks ahead one hour. Windows automatically shifts our time, but Lightning is behind by an hour and so my reminders come up an hour later.

I tried shifting the Lightning Timezone to Asia/Tokyo because we are now in-line with them but it has also changed all my reminders to an hour ahead.

This is unusual behaviour- why would all my reminders change when I've changed my Timezone?

Antzpantz 01:13, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Alarm Reminder Reappearing

I seem to have run across a problem with the alarm reminders for my Lightning alarms. Whenever I enable alarm reminders, it will immediately pop up all the alarms that I have missed so far. I believe this may be normal, but whenever I press "Dismiss," the alarms will reappear again. I can't permanently dismiss them! If it matters, my calendars are sync'd with Google calendars online.

Marking Tasks complete from the Reminder popup.

The reminders work great for the most part, but often time when one pops up, just the simple fact that I'm reminded of it means I don't want to see it ever again because it's finished. As it is now in v0.9, you have to "dismiss" the event, then go to the Tasks screen and mark it complete. It seems like adding a "mark complete" or some such option from the reminder window would make a lot of sense.

Different month views

Personally I don't like the current month view, in which the columns represent days of the week and the rows represent the weeks. However, most users probably do as this is the standard. My feature request would be to add the option to let users choose. Maybe there could be an option similar to the one in Ms Excel to 'swap rows and columns'. I would prefer that the rows represent days and the columns the weeks.

Furthermore I think it would be nice if the week numbers are shown as well (like the days currently displayed as column headers). And that clicking on a week number will take you to the week view. And likewise clicking on the number of the day in the week view could take you to day view.

I think Lightning is a great extension to FF, I'm using it extensively. And I hope you'll benefit from my input. Keep up the good work... :)

"Soon" setting

In the Thunderbird mailbox view, you can view the Today Pane via menu View--> Today Pane--> Show Today Pane F11. If you select the "Show Mini Month" option on that submenu, you get can select options for "±Today," "±Tomorrow," and "±Soon" to show a list of events in the pane below.

I have not yet figured out how to set the option for what the "±Soon" option displays. I would like to see some setting somewhere to allow that, or for someone to kindly send me an email, tell me I am an idiot, and then tell me how to do that. Thank you.

(Today is 2009-03-22 and I only have one event on my calendar. That event is set for 2009-03-31 and it does not appear when I select the "±Soon" option.)

There is an enhancement request for this posted at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455542

Svanslyck 17:36, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Multiple reminders per event

OK so I don't have the memory God gave a microbe. So when setting a task I want to be able to set a reminder for 1 hour before, for X hours before, and for 1 day before, and I'd like to enter these three reminders all at once, when I enter the event. I imagine this could be done by, for example, adding a ± twister to add a row in which to set the next reminder rule.

There is an enhancement request for this posted at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Calendar&format=guided

Svanslyck 19:13, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Confirmations and Reply To

I get an invitation which contains a From, a Sender and a ReplyTo header. Lightning sends my confirmation to the "From" address, but it should be sent to the ReplyTo address.

invitations via email

When converting an eMail to an Event the checkbox 'Send attendees invitations via email' is checked on as default and all recipients are listed. Why? They all got the invitation with the same eMail as you did. The calendar should never attempt to send invitations on its own, only when the user acts.

Invitations should not be send through inaction (accidentally). Maybe this could be included in the preferences of Lightning.

Event/Task color of past dates

I would love to have all Events and Tasks automatically change color once the date with the Event or Task is in the past.

I often use Month view and see all my days at the same time. After the first week, I now have a week of Events that are still the same color as the upcoming Events throughout all the remaining days.

It would be a lot easier to glance at the calendar and see that separation. Ideally that past Event color would be set just like we set the colors now.

Thanks.

One-click snooze (default to last snooze interval)

Often, I find myself wanting to hit "snooze" repeatedly every hour for several hours to make sure I don't forget something. It would be nice if I don't have to select the 1 hour interval each time from the drop down menu. I'd rather have it remember my last snooze interval (specific to each event) and then display that as the default option.

So instead of looking like this:

Snooze for v

It would look like this:

Snooze for 1 hour v (where "v" is the drop down arrow)

In this way, it would be a one-click snooze operation.

Thanks :)

Event/Task repeat by week number. Real world application.

Hi guys Let me start my saying I love Thunderbird and Lightning.

I have been searching for the functionality to be able to schedule jobs on a recurring basis by week number rather than by date. I am sure this would be easy to add to Lightning.

In Event/Task> Repeat> custom there is already Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Annually. However what I need is the ability to schedule a job by week Number regardless as to the date/month. Ideally you would be presented with week numbers 1 to 52 in a grid where you could choose one, many or all weeks.

In addition a useful feature would be if you could chose from a dropdown list every week, every two weeks, every three weeks, every four weeks, every five weeks, every six weeks, every seven weeks, every eight weeks and the corresponding weeks in the grid were automatically selected. Also it would be very useful to be able to name patterns of weeks that you chose (eg Area A which consists of weeks 1,6,9,10,14...) and have them appear in the dropdown list for you to chose easily.

The day of the week would be chosen in the usual way, by right clicking on the start date and selection New Event or New Task or by another dropdown box with the week day in it.

Thanks for considering my request Allanit