New Google Calendar Provider for Thunderbird/Lightning

Finally a Google Calendar Provider for Thunderbird/Lightning has been released that's based on the gdata api, and not just a network XML link.
Problem with the later approach was - to me - that you needed to add each of your calendars separately via their URLs. That seemed to have performance impacts as well. I had about seven such calendars, and it significantly (with my other CalDAV calendars) slowed down Thunderbird start-up time.

When the new provider was released a couple of days ago, I first really noticed, because it forced me - with a separate pop-up - to authorize it for my Google account. With seven calendars this step kept popping up - seven times, of course - but still for the old calendar URLs.
Performance was really nasty...  Thunderbird was unusable essentially.

For some weird reason, I tried a "New Calendar" > "On the Network" > "Google Calendar" and found, that it was actually letting my select Google calendars by account, instead of just letting me add the XML link per calendar like the previous version.

So first thing, delete all my old Google calendars in Lightning, and try the "New Calendar" > "On the Network" > "Google Calendar" again, with my Google account, and voila, it presented all the calendars I had on Google. With the color as on the web. I only needed to select the ones I wanted in Lightning, and that was it.

Should have been like this from the start :)

Thunderbird start-up performance is back to a couple of seconds now (from about 1 minute+)

Lightning Drap'n'Drop Problem

In my earlier post (and comment discussion) about Opening ICS Files with Thunderbird/Lightning we mentioned that you can also drag the .ics link directly from the browser to the calendar pane in Thunderbird/Lightning.
I also found, that this is not always working.

So - as promised - I looked into this a bit.
First, narrow down the "not always" to something reproducible:

I took a link that I knew was working with drag&drop (actually from the timetable of the Austrian Federal Railways), and verified this. Yep, working nicely

Then I just downloaded the resulting .ics file to my local hard disk into a folder that was mapped into my webserver (Tomcat 7). I wrote a tiny .html file that mainly included a link to the .ics file.

Then open the html file in Chrome/Firefox and drag the download text/link into (or is it onto?) the Lightning calendar pane in Thunderbird. Ignore the second line for a second (no pun intended).

Nothing.

Well, that was surprising... So I went on to waste a lot of time with checking the mime-type etc etc.

But it was fine by responding with "text/calendar" - see:

So I took some Java drag&drop code I had, and took a closer look at the data included in the DnD object. Also everything fine there (I spare you the details here).

By chance I looked into the access log of the webserver and found the following:

GET /test/download.icsdownload HTTP/1.1" 404 1001

Which essentially says, that Thunderbird requests a broken URL. It should GET /test/download.ics and not /test/download.icsdownload

No wonder it gets a 404 and cannot import anything.

Quick test to include a "?" in the a href (see above, the second line I asked you to ignore earlier).
If you drag this one, you'll get a
GET /test/download.ics?download? HTTP/1.1" 200 949



As we are handling static files here, the "?download?" appended to the filename will gracefully get ignored and the file will get served (as can be seen by the 200 response code)
And with this link, Thunderbird really imports the file and opens the event dialog.

Fine there.

What Lightning does, is - wrongly - append the text of the html anchor ("download" or "download?") to the URL. You can test with naming the anchor asdfgh and will see that /test/download.icsasdfgh will be requested.

Why does it do it ?

It seems to be that Lightning picks up the HTML fragment data type that gets passed by DnD. The browser passes the full anchor, from begin tag to end tag (see above), and Lightning stupidly parses until the first newline (\n), and throws away the HTML tags.
This is wrong.
Should not happen.
I'll file a bug in bugzilla.

Thunderbird 8 and Lightning 1.0

So, 2 days ago Thunderbird 8 has been released.

The major changes are:

• more restrictive handling of extensions/add-ons, especially those that come from other apps... those will be disabled by default... Thunderbird Installer will guide you through this.

• keyboard short-cuts for the various search options have been changed.

While it has been Ctrl-F for both, the Find within the current message and the QuickFilter for the current folder, it is now

• Ctrl-F for Find (within the current message)
• Ctrl-Shift-K for the QuickFilteron on the folder
• and Ctrl-K is unchanged for the global (indexed) search.

Took me 2 days to get accustomed to the Ctrl-Shift-K.
Well, almost. Not entirely. But I'll manage.

Also I had to "manually" upgrade 3 add-ons that were not declared compatible with TB 8, because no-one cared to update their install.rdf in the XPI file... quite cumbersome... See my rant earlier this year.

Ah, yes, and Lightning finally made it to official release 1.0 ... after years of beta.

Thunderbird 3.1 beta 2 out

Finally the beta2 for the new Thunderbird release (no, just an update, actually) is out[2].

It brings 2 important features:

a) the Lightning nightly updates only work with TB3.1 beta for a couple of weeks now... so finally I am up-to-date again with Lightning as well.

b) the fully indexed search introduced in Thunderbird 3 was great, but what annoyed me ever so slightly, was that they used the same search field for filtering and searching and you had to select from the drop-down what you actually wanted to do (filter the current folder view or search all over the mail boxes).

Cumbersome, at least.

Now with TB3.1 they split those into two... a filter bar and a search bar.

Search is hot-keyed [1] with Ctrl-K (kind of a standard anyway) and filter with Ctrl-F (which is mnemonically OK).
Although the filter bar takes away some space from the folder pane, it is worthwhile (to me). You can always hide it again. Not sure if I can make use of the quick filters for unread/starred/contact/... but let's just see.

What still strikes me as odd, that in the ... uhm ... message pane action area (?) ... not sure what it's real name is... you know, that one here, the one that way introduced with TB3...

Ok...that one. So well they are still missing a "File" or "Move to" action there. Do I really have to hack it into TB with an extension ?

Also they are still missing the Favorite sub-menu in the Move to context menu... only recent folders there... what would be so favored with my favorite folders, if not being a frequent move-to-target.

Still, TB3.1b2 seems quite stable... production grade, it'd say...

---
[1] not sure if this is a verb... well now it is.
[2] download here

Delete nor Not Delete

I noticed a strange co-incidence between Lightning (the Calendar plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird) and the crappy mail client of my Nokia 6233...

Both cannot delete the item you are currently viewing.
Strange.

In Lightning (and I guess in Sunbird as well), when you open an event (or todo item) you cannot delete this very item from the menu or toolbar.

There is simply no delete function.
Only in the various calendar views, but not on the item itself.
This annoys me, because here is exactly the place where you see and know most about the potential delete candidate... what better place to delete it ?
(btw: I already filed bug #392021 against it, but it does not move... maby I'll grab it myself one day)

Same in the email client on my Nokia 6233:Not that anything really works there... The 6233 does something I dubbed "POP over IMAP", since it uses IMAP as a technical protocol layer but only offers POP like features.

There also, I cannot delete the mail I'm currently viewing. I have to go back to the inbox and delete it from there. Crappy.

Restore Natural Order

I just noticed that Thunderbird saves the world.
Really.

If you click on the column selection button in one of the table views, e.g. Inbox, or the Lighning event list
you get a "Restore Natural Order" action.

Cool.

If only we had that in the real world.

What a humble error message

This came up when I wanted to update my nightly build of Lightning:



I just like the wording...

Mozilla Messaging is out

Finally Mozilla Messaging is "out".

"Out" as in "out in the wild", i.e. spun off of Mozilla.

And they announced the plans for Thunderbird3.

"Current plans for Thunderbird 3 include:

* Integrated calendaring (based on the existing Lightning extension)
* Radically improving search
* Many other user interface improvements such as faster workflow, improved feed reading, simpler user interface, automatic configuration, and more."

So, not a lot:

• Lightning (Calendar project) integration was to be expected,
• "radically improving search" is still not a lot if you think of the current search non-capabilities...
• and the items under bullet 3 I don't care for a lot.

Guys, what about a proper address book and social network integration ??

Bugzilla RSS vs Google Reader

I've been monitoring the Mozilla Lightning bugs in bugzilla for a while now using an RSS feed of bugzilla into my Google Reader.
I frequently noticed that the information on some bugs was not complete, but did not really care.
Today's view however, was the best so far and comes with quite some aesthetic touch:


You can really watch as Google Reader tries to retrieve the feed and fails, tries again 3 hours later, gets some more date, and fails ... etc etc ... ad inf.

But it looks great.

Dopplr and Lightning

I just noticed that Dopplr (the social travel site) lets me subscribe to my trips in iCal.
I did so from Lightning, the Thunderbird calendar plugin, and it works fine.

So I know have my office calendar, my Google Calendar and my Dopplr trips all in Lightning.
Cool (if somewhat redundant, though).

Mozilla Lightning 0.7 has been released

Major steps for the Mozilla Calendar project:

Lightning 0.7 & Sunbird 0.7 have been released

Lightning in the plugin (or add-on as they are now called) for Thunderbird.
(There's a standalone version, too, called SunBird).

I've been using betas and nightly builds for (almost) the last year now, and it is really quite stable.
Can't live without it anymore.

Great job, guys.

Now would you please fix the bugs I reported ;-)