Sunbird 0.8 Released
Mozilla Sunbird has released version 0.8, and I’m very excited about that. I’ve been a fan of the stand alone calendar cousin of Firefox and Thunderbird for a while. Here’s a list of the new features straight from Mozilla:
- A new icon set which matches more closely the icon style of other mozilla applications
- Category colors are now shown next to an event box, giving users a much better overview of their differently categorized events
- Events with alarms now have a visual indicator showing an alarm bell
- A totally overhauled alarm dialog
- Sunbird now recognizes the timezone definitions in .ics files created by other applications. This fixes the longstanding issue of Sunbird miscalculating the date or time of events contained in those files
- The timezone guessing has been significantly improved
- Sunbird now contains experimental support for viewing remote calendars offline. This feature has known bugs and is included for testing purposes only
- Sunbird contains several performance fixes, which should improve working with larger calendar files
- You can now define for each of your calendars, whether you want to be notified of alarms for events in these calendars or not
- A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website
After the jump, see what I think about these changes.
As for the new icons, I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been told. I’m just not that concerned with what the buttons look like as long as they do what they look like they should. But I know plenty of people who won’t use a program because the buttons are ugly.
I’m back and forth on if I like the new way that categories are shown. I use the week view and have 3 people’s calendar showing. When there’s not any overlap the new category color system works out really well. But when the time’s overlap it covers the text so that I can’t tell as easily what the event is. This could easily be fixed by me changing the way that I label events, but an option to use the old way would be nice.
The bell that is shown if you have an alarm set for an event is great. It doesn’t take up too much space and is all the way over next to the category color column. It’s about time I have some sort of confirmation about having an alarm set.
Timezones work better now. And anything working better is good. Since I use this just for me it’s not really that big of an issue. But I can see where it would be a problem if timezones didn’t play nicely together.
Showing remote calendars off line is great, even if it is only experimental at this point. But I’m taking it as a very good sign that they think it’s important enough to have out in a public version.
Overall, I’m pretty excited about this. If you haven’t tried Sunbird, then you should.
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