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First screenshots of Lightning!

Mike Shaver gave a notes on how to build Lightning. So… Here goes first screenshots:

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Update: I fixed URLs 🙂 and added one screenshot

27 replies on “First screenshots of Lightning!”

You have a couple of the links wrong, you have misspelt light (see number 4, and a couple of other as well). Thanks for the screenshots though, its nice to see what all the fuss is about!

Lightning is the working project name for an extension to tightly integrate calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks, etc.) into Thunderbird.

Links to the full-screen pictures are broken except for the first one (‘t’ missing: ligh2.png should be light2.png etc.)

I know this is early yet, but I hope they decide to make the default theme look more like Sunbird does currently.

From the slashdot article today ( http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/05/06/12/017227.shtml?tid=185&tid=4 ), I thought that the following comment posted by a widely traveled person about a desired feature would make this aapplication unique and valuable if it is implemented:

Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
by gessel (310103) on Saturday June 11, @10:02PM (#12792275)
(http://www.dis.org/gessel)

Does anyone who ever worked on Outlook ever get on a plane? Ever? Do they know what a time zone is?

There is only one program I’ve found that handles time zones correctly: TrueSync Desktop and it is abandonware. I kept buying motorola P8167s for years just so I could stick with TSD.

There are two features of TrueSync Desktop that no other PIM seems to do correctly, and there is only one correct method. The two features are:

1) When you create an standard event, you specify the time zone the event will happen in. All time zone math is handled automatically. This is the only correct method of handling events for people who travel outside their time zone regularly.

2) When you mark a special day, say a birthday or a holiday, TSD remembers the date, rather than creating a 24 hour event from 0:00 to 23:59. This is the only correct way to handle special days.

Consider the following scenarios, which I face almost every week:

A) You are in California on the phone with someone in Boston planning a phone conference from 10:00-11:30am for next week at which time you’ll be in London. What time should you set the conference for? Can you do the math? How about if you’re in Phoenix in April? There are 31 time zones and almost all contain some regions that observe and some that do not observe DST. This is the sort of irritating arithmetic my computer should do, and only True Sync Desktop does it the right way.

With Outlook can set your system time zone to the time zone the event will happen in, then create the event, then set your time zone back to the time zone you’re in. Oh yeah, that’s really convenient.

B) You make a new friend on a visit a trip that includes a visit to Hawaii and Boston and put her birthday in your outlook/phone tools calendar. You get to San Francisco. What day is her birthday? With outlook when you change time zones the event straddles two days, only one of them the actual correct day. Depending on whether you travel east or west, the correct date is either the first or the second of the two days marked. How flabbergastingly stupid is that?

Now one would think that _someone_ (anyone) involved in the development of outlook would, sooner or later, actually travel to a different time zone and realize just how utterly brain dead their handling of time zones really is (yes, outlook supports two (2)whole time zones, and for purely bicoastal people that’s fine, but some of us actually travel to the flyover states occasionally. And some people even travel outside the US, which is still legal.)

I personally can’t stand the outlook look and feel. I find it sort of smothering, though I acknowledge that there are some good features to it, but if there’s one good model for how a PIM should work it’s True Sync Desktop, but since it won’t sync to a modern phone, it’s just not all that useful anymore, sadly.

Thanks to my incessant whining, BVRP has put time zones on it’s feature path, so Motorola’s PhoneTools might soon correctly implement time zones and all-day events, probably more quickly if more people encourage them to.

#1 – “You have a couple of the links wrong, you have misspelt light (see number 4, and a couple of other as well). Thanks for the screenshots though, its nice to see what all the fuss is about!”

I think you mean misspelled.

[…] Maybe they’re a little late to the game, but Thunderbird is an email program that’s based on the Mozilla project. It’s a great application – I use it at work and home. The forthcoming Lightning application will include To-Do and calendaring in Thunderbird. […]

#1 – “You have a couple of the links wrong, you have misspelt light (see number 4, and a couple of other as well). Thanks for the screenshots though, its nice to see what all the fuss is about!”

I think you mean misspelled.
———————————-

And I’m sure that he mean misspelt, which is a completely valid form of the verb. If you’re going to be anally retentive, at least try and pick on things that are genuinely wrong, otherwise you just end up looking like a dickhead.

Has anybody heard anything about if the 0′.8′ release is still being planned for summer 2005? Last bit o news I could find was the interview from May. Not trying to be impatient, just anxious to try it out (I tried to build from CVS [which I’ve never done before] and I failed miserably).

i would like to thank you for your effort and great hardwork you have put into this assigment, you have done a marveluos job so far, everybody knows that a complex job as this requires a lot of thinking, and error may occur during the first stages, once the work is done and many more people get involve in improving it , it sseen we will have an outstanding product out there

I hope that this calendar/task scheduler will integrate with the online Plaxo service. And how about pocket pc / smartphone sync functionality? Will that be a feature that may happen eventually? Outlook appears to have dominance in the pocket pc field. I refuse to use it.

Hate to resurrect an old discussion, but Mozilla Calendar can sync with PocketPC – via FinchSync (http://www.finchsync.com), which is free (as in beer, can’t remember what the license is) and java-based. Since Lightning is based on Mozilla Calendar, in theory FinchSync should also work with Lightning.

You miss a “t” in the filename in screenshot 2 and 4 couple of the links wrong… cmon please don’t make silly errors like this… it creates a problem

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