With all the developers talking here now, it probably makes sense to also show you, what we've done in terms of real bug-fixing in the last few weeks. So within the last three weeks 28 bugs were fixed. Here's the list of all these changes:

• Bug 358695:
  Week/Multiday view: vertical time column too wide, should be narrower
• Bug 370150:
  API enhancement: additions for group scheduling
• Bug 375631:
  New TASK column: Days to Due
• Bug 392561:
  Need to revise provider error notifications
• Bug 396819:
  Event Summary Dialog doesn't show important information to user
• Bug 416594:
  Priority and progress buttons are broken after customizing toolbar
• Bug 429488:
  Email drag'n'drop populates attendee list and causes failure to save event
• Bug 431522:
  Can't add an invitation to an event if the same event is already in one of your calendars
• Bug 432579:
  Enabling cache for public calendar causes entries to dissappear
• Bug 437451:
  Menu "File -> New -> Calendar" is disabled in Mail Mode
• Bug 437939:
  Invitation counter needs restart for update
• Bug 438546:
  "Select All" (Ctrl+A) & "Undo" (Ctrl+Z) in Mail mode doesn't work
• Bug 438963:
  All day event is shown on the day before the actual day of the event
• Bug 440126:
  Error during timezone guessing [ReferenceError: navigator is not defined]
• Bug 440550:
  XML prologue in calendar-occurrence-prompt.dtd confuses compare-locales
• Bug 440715:
  Selecting event in the unifinder doesn't scroll view to event
• Bug 441246:
  Add support for categories in Google Calendar
• Bug 441748:
  deleting a single occurrence of a 'non floating' all day rule is not possible
• Bug 442003:
  Create a binding to easily add notification bars to emails
• Bug 442392:
  Expected errors are notified via dialog box
• Bug 442571:
  Integrate "Create a new Calendar" into the account central pane
• Bug 442651:
  No organizer in the attendees dialog
• Bug 443157:
  Task invitation leads to exceptions on startup
• Bug 443361:
  Misleading logon prompt when subscribing to multiple Google calendars
• Bug 444292:
  Replace Decorated Header (Nav Bar) by standard Items
• Bug 444407:
  Progressbar should not be shown if column is to narrow or progress is 0%
• Bug 444713:
  Allow providers to provide a set of supported timezones
• Bug 441748:
  deleting a single occurrence of a 'non floating' all day rule is not possible

Many thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that make this possible.

I recently dedicated a good portion of my time improve the calendar views. Initially I wanted to solve a nasty regression bug dealing with overlapping events, but as I delved into the quite monolithic code I got entangled by other issues that caught my attention.

For example I found it not so easy to keep track of all the shadow elements of the event boxes. Also I noticed – certainly like other users too - that the shadows sometimes seem to be sort of tattered at the corners. For this reason I was not too annoyed when Christian (our UI expert) told me that he already had in mind to change the appearance of the shadows anyway. So our common idea was remove the current shadow elements and only denote a slight shadow with a 1Pixel border around the events. I am currently working on this.

As we have discussed on our last F2F meeting in Hamburg we wanted to improve the look and feel of the calendar views in various respects. From the design point of view the decorated view header has the greatest backlog. Christian and me are working on this (Bug 444292). Christian also is currently heavily engaged to modernize the styling of the calendar views that spread a flair of the last century.

So I can promise you that you will hear and see more about the calendar views in the coming weeks even though we are approaching the final round of our 0.9 roadmap. One last note about the monolithic code: I won't change too much about this shortly, although it is certainly better for the project in the long run if we do this. But with the lack of a compiler I have developed a certain respect for such challenges...

Yesterday we had a pretty interesting developer conference call, which was basically about the issue that only a very small team is currently developing on Lightning and Sunbird (basically just three people), that it is hard to reach community expectations with regards to bugfixes and feature work with so small a team and what would be necessary to attract more outside developers.

From my point of view one of our shortcomings in the past has been on the communication front. With that I don't mean the communication between different people on certain bug characteristics or code issues (that works great), but the communication between the calendar project and our community.

Currently our channels of communication are:

• This blog, which just gets a post every one to two weeks with a bug fix status update
• our developer and support newsgroups (mozilla.dev.apps.calendar and mozilla.support.calendar), which are not exactly buzzing with activity
• IRC, which not many people are watching

The result - at least as far as I see it - is that

• the core people from the project come across as a closed circle to which it is hard to get in to (the opposite is true)
• what's going on in the project is not exactly transparent. Instead I would call it opaque.

So what can we do to improve our situation, to make the project more transparent, to raise the interest in the project and by that to gain more outside contributors? A few things come to my mind:

• We need to talk more about what we are doing. Therefore every core contributor will try to commit himself to at least blog about various stuff at least once a week from now. These posts will probably range from developer-oriented topics (interesting or disgusting pieces of code, recent bugfixes, UI considerations, QA problems/successes/challenges) and project-related topics (PR issues, community relations, ...) to basically anything that the people find worthwhile to blog about.
  In my opinion a great example to follow here is the Firefox community. Where nearly everybody involved in the project (developers, build engineers, QA staff, PR and marketing people, management) tries to blog regularly about various Firefox stuff or other stuff that interests them. The outside image that this creates is the image of a beehive, where everybody is doing lots of stuff to improve Firefox and in my opinion stuff like this also attracts outside people, because everybody would like to contribute to a project that is alive and well instead of a project that is stalling or dead.
• We need to raise the awareness of the project in the outside world. I'll try to contact a few people to get some press contacts, in the hope to do some interviews with some people interested in open source. We hope that this will raise the awareness of Lightning and Sunbird and bring in outside contributors.

• Bug 363191:
  Handle Timezones more efficiently (Timezone Database)
• Bug 367153:
  Event text not readable in calendar view during inline editing (due to unselection)
• Bug 387398:
  Missing (Client, Server) Certificate support
• Bug 387402:
  Short or zero-length events are hard or not selectable in Day/Week view
• Bug 389251:
  Cannot dismiss alarm on single overridden instance of recurring item
• Bug 391495:
  calRecurrenceInfo::getNextOccurrence/getNextOccurrenceDate have bugs
• Bug 395017:
  Event & Task dialog for read-only calendars don't show start time and end/due date and time
• Bug 399762:
  Task dialog: Error opening Invite Attendees dialog
• Bug 408240:
  Reading backup preferences fails [Error: backupBranch is not defined]
• Bug 413326:
  Read only calendar, use 'Click Here to Add a New Task' text field -> nothing happens
• Bug 413847:
  Timezone preference changes require restart to take effect (regression)
• Bug 413908:
  Events using internal timezones are no longer updated to recent timezone version
• Bug 419807:
  After closing task dialog now save-messagebox pops up
• Bug 419816:
  Task mode does not set Application title
• Bug 428496:
  Editing event or dismissing alarm collapses Today/Tomorrow/Soon section in Agenda
• Bug 429092:
  Borders are missing for Task List in Today Pane and Task Mode
• Bug 429685:
  Toggling of 'Delete' - toolbarbutton in calendar-mode and task-mode does not work
• Bug 429687:
  Follow-up features for the mode dependent today-pane
• Bug 431536:
  Only one invitation can be accepted per Thunderbird session
• Bug 431811:
  Context menu of tasks in today pane is broken [Error: taskTree has no properties]
• Bug 432579:
  Enabling cache for public calendar like US Holidays causes entries to dissappear
• Bug 435877:
  UTF-8 decoding problem breaks wcap calendar
• Bug 436476:
  Deleting a single instance of a recurring event fails
• Bug 437048:
  Invite an attendee to an event causes error
• Bug 437189:
  Gdata prov: cannot delete last remaining occurence by "delete this occurence"
• Bug 437398:
  Invitation Link broken (currently WCAP only): createXULElement is undefined
• Bug 437593:
  invitations link should be provided in mail mode too
• Bug 437615:
  Exceptions when creating/editing/deleting an event/task/calendar or selecting/deselecting a calendar
• Bug 437689:
  [Trunk] Timezone definitions extension is not compatible with Sunbird 0.6a1
• Bug 437898:
  events list can have a selector for 'later today' list. (prerequisites, actual fix done as extension, see bug)
• Bug 437921:
  GData provider is not working with TB 3a2pre by default
• Bug 437941:
  Task-Trees: Selection Style does not make a difference between focused/unfocused
• Bug 437942:
  Find calendars is broken
• Bug 437964:
  'Mark Completed' via context menu doesn't work
• Bug 438020:
  Task list is broken [Error: document.getElementById(modeBroadcaster) has no properties]
• Bug 438338:
  Add zh-TW language
• Bug 439245:
  Selecting events in the unifinder doesn't scroll view to event
• Bug 439608:
  modifyEventWithDialog cannot be called with false as third parameter
• Bug 439633:
  Error console output in month/multiweek view when selecting events in the unifinder

Only three days after the last status update, it's already time for another as the developers have fixed lots of bugs (19) in the last three days.

The most notable fixes are in the area of iMIP/iTIP (sending and receiving e-mail invites) with the fixes for bug 377761 (better compatibility with earlier Outlook releases) and bug 429938 (support for meeting cancellation).

Here's the list of all the 19 changes within the last three days:

• Bug 202360:
  Color Coding of Tasks and Events (multiple classification)
• Bug 322979:
  Views should not scroll the labelling columns along the non-scrolling axis
• Bug 368976:
  Cannot undefine alarm for an exception
• Bug 377761:
  Outlook 200x does not recognize iTIP/iMIP invitation because of MIME type issues
• Bug 397896:
  Sync default snooze between Sunbird and Lightning
• Bug 397913:
  Add tooltips to the miniday buttons
• Bug 401693:
  Today pane not updated on Mac OS X after hibernation
• Bug 426746:
  Consolidate startup code
• Bug 427006:
  Timezone offset incorrectly calculated for negative half hour timezones
• Bug 428715:
  Between 23:00 and 00:00, the default event start date is 00:00 of the next day
• Bug 429938:
  No cancel message is send to attendees if event is deleted
• Bug 430254:
  Add interfaces to GData for UI code
• Bug 430805:
  Permit to change the default free/busy attribute policy for all-day events
• Bug 431829:
  Moving Today Pane button on Task toolbar removes it from Calendar toolbar
• Bug 432218:
  Remove TB 1.5 specific code in getMailBar() function
• Bug 432499:
  Duplicate id in calendar.xul
• Bug 432703:
  Changing month with scroll wheel throws error
• Bug 432793:
  Get rid of "move" transaction type
• Bug 432794:
  Allow loading chrome scripts in test cases

Many thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that made and make this possible.

Two weeks ago, we had a great face-2-face meeting, which only now I am able to post about. Among the many interesting talks and discussions particular question we've discussed was "How do we proceed with Thunderbird 3 and trunk?". I'll try to sum up the outcome of this discussion here.

There are a ton of good reasons to move on to the trunk ASAP and help Thunderbird 3 get into shape: calendar will be a core feature of it, trunk has a couple of platform improvements that make our live easier and it will lessen the load on developers and localizers, that we no longer have to think about both the 1.8 branch and the trunk.

On the other hand, we have existing users on Thunderbird 2 waiting for fixes and features. Looking at our resource situation, it was pretty clear to everyone that we can't support and develop both branch and trunk longer term in a reasonable fashion. So where and when do we make the cut?

We've agreed to do one further release on branch in the coming 4 months, namely 0.9. We will focus on the following topics:

• Usability (our UI gurus have a lot of ideas here)
Performance (we will put more focus on improving our story with large remote calendars)Interoperability (better iMIP/iTIP support comes to my mind here)

More details can be found on http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Lightning09.

We hope that this release will be sufficient to be used for a longer period of time until the next Thunderbird releaseis out. There will definitely be usable betas (perhaps even alphas) of Thunderbird with integrated calendar, but we also know that some users reject to use those and stay on Thunderbird 2.

We had some further discussion about whether the naming of this last branch release shouldn't be 1.0, rounding up our development for Thunderbird 2. This seems obvious from a marketing POV, but doesn't fit into the mozilla way of promoting major releases. So we agreed that we have a thorough look at what we've reached both w.r.t. features and quality when 0.9 is almost done, postponing that decision.

To answer some obvious questions:

• Does this imply changes on Sunbird's development?
  No, we will do parallel releases of Sunbird with the Lightning releases. So Sunbird 0.9 will come out at the same time as Lightning 0.9 and we'll move Sunbird development over to the trunk after that, too. This means we will be doing a Sunbird 1.0 release in parallel to the Thunderbird 3 release.
• What happens if Thunderbird 3 gets delayed?
  We certainly do not hope that this will be the case, but we can react flexibly to that. This means that we might put out another release between 0.9 and TB3 (probably called something like 0.9.5) if it turns out that TB3 will take significantly longer (more than 3-4 months) than anticipated.
• When are you planning to release 0.9? What is the release date of TB3?
  We are currently planning to release Lightning and Sunbird 0.9 in August 2008. As with all release dates, this release date is subject to change, if it turns out that we need additional time to put out a great release.
  TB3 is currently slated for December 2008/early 2009. The same caveats as said above apply here.

Since the release of 0.8 many people have asked for builds on additional platforms and we're happy to comply as our community has supplied us with builds for Linux x86-64, Solaris (Intel), Solaris (SPARC) and OS/2.

Here are the links:

• Lightning 0.8:
  • Linux x86-64
  • OS/2
  • Solaris (Intel)
  • Solaris (SPARC)
• Sunbird 0.8:
  • Linux x86-64
  • OS/2
  • Solaris (Intel)
  • Solaris (SPARC)

Many thanks to Philipp Kewisch for the Linux x86-64 builds, to Sun Microsystems for the Solaris builds and to Walter Meinl and Peter Weilbacher for the OS/2 builds. Enjoy!

I am happy to report, that the 0.8 release of Lightning and Sunbird has been completed and is now available via AMO and the Calendar Project website.

Five months after the 0.7 release we are again one step closer to our 1.0 release, which we hope to release at the end of 2008.

Notable improvements of this release are written down:

• In the Lightning 0.8 release notes
• In the Sunbird 0.8 release notes

Lightning 0.8 and Sunbird 0.8 are available for Windows, Mac OS X (universal builds) and Linux in 30 different languages including English.

Please use the following links to download the release:

• Lightning 0.8 (fully localized for 30 languages)
• Sunbird 0.8 in English or other languages

Please read the release notes for Lightning 0.8 and Sunbird 0.8 before downloading.

Thank you again to all our developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters. We would not be able to do this without your assistance!