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.

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Defining refresh schedules/forcing updates would be good. GS

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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First, I VERY much look forward to this release so I can abandon the bloated software that is Outlook but still integrate with Exchange. 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.

A Thunderbird/Mozilla Calendar - Windows Smartphone application...why such a thing would be revolutionary, and would reduce my need to use Microscraps Outlook to zero, with the exception of going back to see why I left it in the first place. Please please please please pretty please develop such and application.

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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, coud 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

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 serveur 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.

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

What is the Public's Desire

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

• Try and accomodate 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 calendare 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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Not sure where to add this, but tabs for each of email, calendar, and tasks would be a really nice way to embed the calendar into thunderbird, and make it really easy to switch between the various elements.

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What about another tab for contacts?

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If this project bears fruit, the number of Thunderbird users would increase quite a bit (I'm not sure whether to write "exponentially" here or not, but I'd guess the number of users would easily double or triple). Not having an integrated calendar/appointment feature is what keeps many of my friends and colleagues from switching over from Outlook to Thunderbird.

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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 analagous 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 = )

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 calanders 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.

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 elegent 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 enviroment as described above, I can also imagine lots of use in private life eg organizing family reunions, weddings, anniversarys, vacations aso. But even in my everyday personal routine, most decisions I make envolve 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

Official Name

Just being goofy, but Thunderbird + Sunbird = Lightningbird? --WorldMaker

Interlinking

Many years ago there was an excellent product, can't recall the name, that used a Filofax(tm) metafore for the user interface. I think Lotus bought it out in the end.

Within this was an excelent feature allowing interlinking of calendar, contacts, notes, to do's etc. by clicking on a chain (...link) icon and then on the two items to link. The linked items then showed a chain symbol on them which acted as a hyper link Between them. Each item could be linked to any number of others but onlu one hyperlink was ever shown, hovering the cursor over it gave a select list of links.

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.

[piers7: IIRC, you're describing OfficeTalk, and yes it was a neat feature]

Auto-detect Dates in email

A very useful Thunderbird/Lightning feature would be an extention in Tbird 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)

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).

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 loooking 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 capablilites. 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 utlizing 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.

Write to LDAP

Would be nice a feature that permit write over a LDAP directory used for contact (no just search and read but write and delete stuff). I guess the only program do this is Evolution2.

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 accomodate this new "wallpaper" function. Does this sound like something very useful and convenient only to me or others too?

Taicho

Calendar function: Layered approach

It would be a great competitive advantage over other tools if Lightning could include a "layered" view of the calendar.

Imagine a normal calendar view, full of appointments, birthdays, anniversaries, public holidays etc. Then add other recurring items such as work-out schedules, spouses travel plans, childrens after-school activities etc. In the end, a normal "vacant day" ends up so packed that it's impossible to distinguish it from a real packed day.

Introducing :LAYERED CALENDAR - where users with a click of a button can chose what to see. Import your spouse's calendar into your own to see where you both have free time, then add or remove workout schedules, non-mandatory weekly conference calls, etc etc.

This can not be achieved by "Free/Busy" as my local gym, my conference calls etc, are not available there. Thus the "Layered View" where I through a checklist decide how much/little I want to see. I could even include my favorite TV show or newscast which I try to watch if there's nothing else, but don't want it to polute my normal calendar view...

Thanks for considering this!

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 lables (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 emil 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)

SAH Mom perspective COLOR CODING EVENTS

I would really like the upcoming calendar function to have color coded labeling for events. It is really easy to look at the calendar for everyone in the family and see who has what, when. Also, to be able to post this color coded event calendar to a website. Other requests would be to have a 'notes' feature and to be able to sync with my pocket pc. Color coding being the most requested feature for me. Thanks, Beth Stout JMINTA: Color coding events is already done and working.

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

Using Mouse's scroll wheel to scroll

I would very much like to be able to scroll any day/week/month view using the scroll wheel of the mouse. Example when I focus my mouse in the month view (left panel) and move the scroll wheel up by one unit the calendar's display should change to the next month's view and if I move the scroll wheel down by one unit the display should change to the previous month's display. The same behaviour should be seen in the main panel when viewing the calendar details. Using the scroll wheel should change the display appropriately.

Hopefully this feature will be implemented in the lightning project for all the frames related to the clalendar views that are present within the main application.

Apparently the above feature is already filed here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241040
Thanks,
Seshu

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 everytime.

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?

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.

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.

Remove the Calendar Extension and replace with Lightning

The extension listed at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=208&application=thunderbird needs to be removed at once. People are still using this over Lightning. Putting Lightning on the addons website will greatly improve feedback.