Monday, February 07, 2005

The Mozilla Foundation has released the first version of Sunbird, a standalone calendar application, and you can download it here.

Sunbird 0.2 has various features including the ability to create scheduled events, and to see an overview of events on a particular day, week or month. The calendar can be shared by publishing it to a webDAV-capable server, such as the one provided by the Apache module mod_dav.

WebDAV is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote Web servers.

David McGuinness pointed out that Sunbird is a relatively new software that is not aimed at enterprise users at present.

"Sunbird is still in the early stages of development and is certainly experimental software," said McGuinness. "Nonetheless Sunbird is a promising application for those already using Thunderbird or Firefox."

Although Sunbird is a standalone calendar project, the Mozilla Foundation has started a project to integrate it with Thunderbird. The project, code-named Lightning, is scheduled for its first general-user release in the middle of 2005, according to the Mozilla Web site.