lazyweb - heirs to mozcal/sunbird?

[trochee]

I've been less than thrilled with Sunbird, the Mozilla-suite calendaring program.

It works okay, but it doesn't seem to be robustly supported. (In November 05, they released 0.3 alpha, after nearly a year of silence.)

The key features I'm looking for are:

1. the ability to sync against webDAV calendars, such as the one at iCal Exchange, which I currently use. It's not enough to pull them down, it has to be able to push local edits up too.
2. The ability to subscribe to multiple calendars -- I keep separate calendarfiles for my lab, my classes, and my personal time. But I'd like to look at them all in the same place.

Sunbird currently does both these critical pieces, yet I'd like to get away from it.

Any recommendations?

Update: looks like the Mozilla Calendar extension to Firefox manages to avoid the biggest Sunbird problems -- namely, that it isn't packaged for Debian or Ubuntu. And I can get Firefox to work just about everywhere.

Comments

[xaosenkosmos.livejournal.com]

I spent forever trying to find out what the deal with this was.

RFC2445,6, and 7 define the standard. One of the larger projects to implement them apparently caught sourceforge syndrome^[1]: Reefknot.

I looked through the RFCs and immediately realized that it was written by entrenched, implemented vendors for entrenched, implemented vendors. I'll be deeply impressed if anyone manages to implement those damned things and then put a decent UI on it.

1. Lots of really well-developed ancillary materials, a full CVS setup, and not-quite a framework gets developed before all the "developers" move on to creating ancillary materials and setting up CVS for their next almost-framework.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

oh, that's really neat! thanks.

of course I'm not interested in jumping into the reefknot thing -- I'm asking from a client point of view, after all -- and the Mozilla Calendar project does basically what I want. Multiple users and multiple permissions, in a robust sort of way -- that would be harder, and I'm happy to say I'm not needing that (though an earlier related research project turned up SchoolTool, which certainly looks sharp).

I'm looking for a linux client that fills the Mac iCal niche.

[xaosenkosmos.livejournal.com]

I guess i failed to make my point: aside from Lotus/IBM, Microsoft, and Apple (ie: those wrote RFC2445~7, defining iCal, and all of whom had implementations already), nobody's going to implement iCalendar decently. Even if you threw money at the problem, you're likely to have one hell of a time pulling together sufficient talent at both levels (library and UI). You'll get libraries, and you'll get UIs, but it's not likely that you'll have a decent UI on top of a decent/reliable/complete iCalendar library.

Calendaring is among the least sexy problems out there, yet it's one of the harder ones. It's the perfect antithesis of what gets done in the OSS/FS community. So i don't see it getting done by anyone but Ximian/Novell, which already have it in Evolution. Which is slightly above Outlook but below Outlook Express and far below pine in my preferred MUA list.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

hm. it seems like the mozilla calendar component does a reasonably good job at the iCalendar client aspect. The protocol may be crap, but I'm not sure what it would mean to be complete beyond what it already does for me -- that is, keep track of appointments. And the Gecko framework is a reasonably nice UI, from my point of view.

Not sure what you would want that's a lot different -- is there something fundamentally wrong with the Moz calendar approach?