Lightning in a Bottle
February 13, 2009 · by Scott Fradkin
Or at least in Thunderbird.
I haven’t used Windows on my personal computer for about six years or so. At the time I made the leap into the Linux [1] realm full-time, I figured that I could do anything I needed to in Linux. There’s usually an alternative to pretty much any Windows program. Or so I thought. I’ll admit to keeping around a copy of Windows XP running in a virtual machine (Sun Virtualbox [2]… it’s a really great product. Free, with full USB 2.0 support. Take that VMWare [3]!), but I don’t really use it for much. Ok… mostly I needed it to setup my new printer (HP, are you listening? Why don’t you make your networked products accessible to Linux? Why don’t you allow network setup via the printer’s LCD screen?).
One of the few things that I couldn’t find a good solution for was some sort of calendaring program. Windows has an immediate entry here with Outlook. I’ve never been a huge fan of Outlook, but it gets the job done in typical Microsoft fashion. I was happy when Google came along with Google Calendar since that gave me a way to at least create calendar entries and setup reminders for things, but I still missed the integration on the desktop that something like Outlook gives.
I subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s RSS feed [4]. His most recent entry talked about about a product called Flashbake [5] that uses Python and Git to create a snapshot repository for writers to allow a writer to keep versioned copies of their documents along with metadata pulled from various sources at the time the periodic snapshots are taken. Pretty cool stuff. He also included a bit about a Thunderbird add-on called Lightning. Lightning [6] is the plugin version of Mozilla’s Sunbird, a calendaring application.
This is what I’ve been waiting for! It brings Outlook style calendaring into the Mozilla Thunderbird realm. So far it’s worked nicely. You can create calendar entries for appointments, meetings, and tasks. You can invite people to appointments. You can share your calendar. You can interact with Google calendar. Everything I wanted. Granted, I’m not a calendar power user, so your mileage may vary, but it’s a decent product.
[1] – http://www.gentoo.org
[2] –http://www.virtualbox.org/
[3] –http://www.vmware.com/
[4] –http://craphound.com/
[5] –http://bitbucketlabs.net/flashbake/
[6] –http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/
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