The Lightning Project is part of Mozilla's long-running quest to bring robust calendaring functionality to their open source suite of desktop tools. Lightning (formerly known as Sunbird) is an extension for Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client. The extension, like its parent application, is cross-platform and offers compatibility with the .ics calendar standard. The first official release of Lightning arrived on Monday night.
For those of us who use various calendars in MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Apple's iCal, this extension is a major breakthrough. I keep track of all of my editorial activity using a shared calendar through iCalX.com, so I can securely share my personal calendars among all of my computers. Lightning's release allows me (and everyone else) to keep all of our calendars in one application with true cross-platform compatibility. There's also support for WebDAV calendar backup.
There are some screenshots from O'Reilly's OSDir.com that have been making the rounds on the blogs today. I decided to make my own. I subscribed to my shared calendar. Nice and easy. Next, I exported a calendar from Outlook on my PC and dropped it into Lightning. I also imported an iCal calendar, made some changes, and exported it. Mozilla's Lightning engineers note that you may experience data loss when editing a calendar created outside of Thunderbird/Lightning, but everything works smoothly here on my Mac.
The month view in Thunderbird 1.5:
And the week view:
Some of the future plans for Lightning, according to the Mozilla folks, include better Thunderbird address book integration, linkage between emails and tasks, improved CalDAV support, and improved syncronization.
[link to O'Reilly screenshots via digg.com]
