[Novices] RE: Thunderbird Integration WAS: Evolution mail client

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> Ahhh, but it is likely.  Sort of, in the standard Unix way of
> integrating, i.e., by building lots of little tools that CAN work
> together but are built separately.  I believe the calendaring portion is
> called the iCalendar project but I may be mistaken.  

Nope; iCalendar is a quasi-standard file format for storing event data.
May applications support iCalendar/iCal to greatly varying degrees of
success.

The Mozilla calendar client is called Sunbird.  It work's today,  but
isn't terribly impressive.  But there is a general Mozila calendar
project,  that one presumes will be available in Thunderbird as an
extension.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird.html

But there is a VERY important distinction to be made between a PIM
(Personal Information Client) which Firebird's address book is, and
Sunbird's calendar is - and a Groupware client.  The interfaces may look
the same, but the applications are very much not the same.  PIMs are
about storing *your* information,  groupware clients deal with other's
information.  With a PIM there is events,  in a Groupware client there
are meetings which have permissions as to who can see/modify them and
have other participants.  iCal files are about PIM data.

> This is more of a possibility now than when they started the Phoenix;
> er, Firebird; er, Firefox project due to the adoption of XML and XUL.
> (Yes, I know, they were around back in 1998 but it was not clear that
> they would be universally adopted.)  These standards allow completely
> separate applications to access the same data.  Additionally, Firefox
> has pioneered truly easy-for-the-user-to-install-yet-maintain-stability
> extensions. 

Yep, XUL is cool.  We should really have a presentation about XUL!

> Now that Firefox has taken off (18 million downloads as of 1/18/05), I
> suspect that integration by parts (pun intended) will follow shortly.

Now if only Thunderbird could score a similair win against Outlook;  but
it has aways to go before that happens. (1) Palm/PDA connectivity is
just terrible, (2) no SyncML support [not even from Sync4j], (3)
integration with WAB (Windows Address Book) is kind of wierd.