Electronic Fiddling Around
It’s been some days since we last posted words here. It’s been partly due to the fact that we like to lay low as the year draws to an end. The other reason is because I’ve been fiddling around with our computers here, i.e. trying to “streamline” my digital life. One major task was to archive my email box which consisted of about 3 email domains, with one domain containing at minimum 3 email accounts, 6 years in all, both sent and received. Honestly, half way through, I really wanted to “control” + “A”, “control” + D and be done with it. (Hot-key monkeys will get what I mean). I want to JUST SELECT ALL AND DELETE…
I held back and managed to finish the archiving shortly after midnight. The next three hours were spent migrating my old email box into my new email application. I jumped the gun and loaded up Thunderbird 1.5, the newish email client from the Mozilla folks who brought you Firefox. What’s nice about Thunderbird, besides the fact that it is open source, is that they have now added Sunbird, the Mozilla calendar, as an extension for Thunderbird. That extension is called Lightning (I know, there are naming issue with these products) Thunderbird pro’s are that it includes a built-in “News & Blog” reader. For those who are wondering, Bureaux’s feed can be found here: http://bureaux.petitemort.org/feed Another other cool feature in this bundle is that Lighting allows you to subscribe to iCalendars! (iCal, CalDAV, And Java System Calendars) So I subscribed to Barry Hoggard and James Wagner ArtCal’s Calender. It’s live and direct - I Love it. Too bad both Apple and Microsoft couldn’t figure out that we want all our communication in one app! Or maybe they did but thought ‘d be better business to dice it up into a 100 little apps and then sell it to us in pricey pieces. (Adobe is completely guilty of this by creating two apps Photoshop and ImageReady, watch-out Adobe, after the open source community cleans up in the office, they’re destined to hit the imaging department.)
I did find one kink in Lightning calendar that made me think twice about having done what I have done. It’s that the current version cannot send calendar meetings (.ics files) But I’m confident that they’re, the version out now isn’t even 1.0 and it’s already in good shape. You can however, receive simple .ics files from people on Outlook or Entourage. Don’t ask me to tell you what I mean by simple, all I know is that I’ve tested a few and the meetings with less data where easily added to Lightning via a easy to see “add to calendar” button in Thunderbird’s email preview pane. Other more complex meetings .ics files arrived as an attachment that returns errors when you attempt to manually import it in to the Lighting calendar.
I also recently read a funny comment in CNet’s article Mozilla’s Lightning to Strike Outlook? from a rather overly confident Microsoft spokesperson stating that they were by no means worried about Thunderbird replacing Outlook in large corporations, because it just isn’t as powerful as Outlook. Maybe there are hidden features in Outlook that we aren’t aware of??, come on- it’s not rocket science. In fact it’s more about paying attention to user needs than fancy programming that’s paving the way for all these new open source software takeovers. If enough people want it, then it is built in- simple as that. No more fights about “we’re not supporting a Mac format or XP format, etc. etc”. Can’t they see, applications are the new pencil, the new paper, chisel, and hammer. Human evolution is not gonna let proprietary software stand in the way of exploring new terrain.
Which brings me to my last bit of food thought. It’s on a quote from Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, (who by the way, has just launched OpenServering - FREE SERVER AND BANDWIDTH FOR ALL!!!), said about Wikipedia, quoted in New York Press article Media Threat… “Wikipedia is based on a very radical idea, the realization of the dreams most of us have always had for what the Internet can and should become … We’re already taking back the Internet. With your help, we can take back the world.”
Mozilla fans who are interested in making it your own and contributing to the development of these open source products can see a list of Mozilla projects here.