Sunbird is a calendar application built by the people at the Mozilla Foundation. It s entirely standalone: it doesn't require the bulk of another application to manage all of your appointments and events.

Sunbird, Mozilla's calendar application, supports extensions just as Firefox and Thunderbird do. What kind of extensions work with a calendar? How about being able to get a weather forecast when you're setting up a golf date, or exporting your desktop calendar to a Web service?

"I am happy to report, that the 0.7 of Lightning and Sunbird has been completed and is now available via AMO and the Calendar Project website..."

Mozilla's Sunbird calendaring application lives perpetually in the shadow of its siblings Firefox and Thunderbird, garnering just a fraction of the developer effort and publicity lavished on the browser and email client. Nevertheless, it is slowing maturing into a reliable tool worthy of the Mozilla brand.

When trying to add the iceowl-extension package — Debian's renamed version of Mozilla's Lightning/Sunbird calendar app — to an existing Icedove installation in Lenny, I quickly learned from Mozilla's Calendar Weblog that a certain library package must be installed before you install Lightning/Iceowl.

"I am happy to report, that the 0.8 release of Lightning and Sunbird has been completed and is now available via AMO and the Calendar Project website. Five months after the 0.7 release we are again one step closer to our 1.0 release, which we hope to release at the end of 2008..."

The newest versions of Lightning and Sunbird, released simultaneously by Mozilla yesterday, include 38 new calendars as well as support for Google Calendar, a viable print function, enhanced support for Outlook displays and numerous other upgrades.

Mozilla's Sunbird gives you customization options for the interface as well as a rich set of under-the-hood controls for setting up where, how and when the application gets its information.

"As I’ve mentioned before, the Mozilla Calendar project, which includes the Lightning calendar extension to Thunderbird, is moving right along. It’s currently at version 0.7, heading towards a 0.8 release ASAP. I’ve asked the Calendar team how I can help, and the answer has been clear — they need more developers..."