I am digging Thunderbird & Lightning
Presently, I use Thunderbird (2.0.0.0) with the Lightning extension (0.5 RC1) for my calendar option, making a pretty clean version of a unified mail/calendar client. Yeah…both have a few bugs, but for me, it has been working really well. A lot of new features have gone into the calendar project, making Lightning a very convenient and extensible application that can sit inside Thunderbird. Here is a little bit of background on my experience:
I have done my best to file new bugs about the tricky things I was experiencing when using both Thunderbird and Lightning. In each case, the developers have responded very quickly with suggestions on how to fix my problems or questions about my experience to verify that it was a new bug. A lot of answers to questions can be found at places like the Thunderbird knowledge base on mozillaZine, so I always check there first. At times, I think I find a bug and do my best to file it.
Until yesterday, I was running Lightning 0.3.1. But, after filing this bug, ssitter suggested I upgrade to 0.5 RC1. What a blessing! The new version of Lightning is great. Nice work guys. I also use the Provider for Google Calendar (developed by Philipp Kewisch) extension that allows Lightning to read and write to the Google Calendar. I now read and write to three different Google Calendars (all the calendars are being used as scheduling tools for specific Mozilla-related projects), and to my work calendar, which is a web-based Zimba app. As a first test, I invited a new Mozilla colleague from China to a meeting with me. The invitation came from my Zimbra calendar through Lightning, inside the Thunderbird interface. Lo and behold, Li accepted and the meeting appeared on both the Lightning app and the web-based version of my Zimbra calendar. Google calendar is working the same way.
Awesomely (is that a word?), I have a unified and tight email/calendar client. Please check it out and email me if you are having trouble setting it up. I can at least tell you what I’ve done.
OK, can’t help myself (being a writer): It’s “Lightning.”
“Lightening” means “becoming lighter in color.”
Ugh…Don’t you just hate when you write something and you just know something doesn’t look right, but you can’t quite figure it out? I played with that spelling a few times and never thought to look it up…lesson learned. Oh well, thanks, Sheppy!
Very cool. Thanks. I’ll be playing around with this for the rest of the day.
I must say the combination of email client and calendar system in one is not something I am too worried about. For that reason I use Calgoo http://www.calgoo.com to sync with google cal as we as subscribe to a couple icals (baseball beer league etc).
Only problem is my girlfriend got me on it and now she can add events to my calendar as she pleases – my weekend is usually full by wed, *sigh* mostly with weekend to-do’s like fix this and fix that.
mike
Nice to hear of your good experiences. It really is amazing work the Calendar team are doing, large advances really pretty quickly.
I’m yet to try using Google Calendar as well, can’t wait till 0.5
Might even try out Lightning.