I’ve been so busy working on the Thunderbird 3 release that I forgot to blog about this new development:  I’m pleased to announce that Mozilla Messaging has engaged Philipp Kewisch, lead of the Calendar project, to help drive the release of a version of the popular Lightning calendar add-on.  The plan so far is for Philipp (who’se in school, but somehow finds time to do Mozilla work after that) to help fix bugs, drive the release, and generally make sure that people who want to upgrade from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3 will find their favorite extension working there.

If you’re keen to help, let Philipp know, and participate in test days, help QA release candidates that will show up, and if you can, chip in with patches!

CalConnect (The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium) will host a one-day Timezone Workshop on Tuesday, February 3, 2009, at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. This workshop is intended for and open by invitation to parties with an interest in Timezones, how they are currently implemented and managed, and what to do about them in the future. We particularly want to attract representatives of other industry and technology areas to gain a broad perspective on the problems with Timezones as implemented today, and the relevance of our proposed direction. You do not need to be a CalConnect member to attend the workshop. Please see http://www.calconnect.org/timezoneworkshop.shtml for more information, and to request an invitation to the event.

Still, the two students assigned to me, Mike Wu and Ronald Fung, did a great job. Ronald Fung led a messy part of the project, which was about teaching Thunderbird how to detect RSS/Atom feeds in pages that mention feeds but aren’t feeds themselves, work which will likely make its way into Thunderbird 3 at some point. Thanks!

Mike Wu led the development of a Remember The Milk provider to Lightning, the calendaring add-on to Thunderbird. RTM is a popular website for tracking TODOs, so it seemed a good alternative storage mechanism for Lightning users (alternatively, Lightning seemed like a good front end for RTM users). That add-on is now on addons.mozilla.org. Nice job!

First, Marco Zehe came to talk about the state of accessibility in Thunderbird and Calendar. The take-away message to me was that accessibility for “trunk” (Thunderbird 3, etc.) is pretty good, thanks to all the work done at the platform level. There are some outstanding issues, which we agreed to consider as blocking Thunderbird 3, but it’s one of those areas where the next version of Thunderbird will be significantly better than the current one for a subset of users.

Second, at my instigation, Jan Lenhardt gave a talk about CouchDB, which was nicely off topic but thought-provoking. The coolest bit is that about an hour after the end of Jan’s talk, Philipp Kewisch, Calendar hacker extraordinaire, and author of the GData add-on for Calendar, had whipped up a proof-of-concept CouchDB provider for Lightning, meaning that calendar data (events, etc.) can be stored in a couchdb repository.

Kudos to the CouchDB and Calendar teams for building systems that clearly are easy to extend, and to HTTP/REST and JSON for providing great building blocks.

Make sure you read the release notes, as there are a couple of important points to follow.

Congratulations to the Calendar team!

Nothing like being minority players to get competitors to cooperate on pushing a standard forward!