Mozilla has released the latest beta versions of their calendar apps Sunbird (Standalone program) & Lightning (Thunderbird calendar plugin).   It’s been a while since the last release (January, IIRC) on these projects, there doesn’t seem to be as much developer interest in these ones, so it’s great to see some progress being made. I really think Thunderbird has zero chance of competing with Outlook in any meaningful way until it has a stable calendar function.  For your average home user it may not be all that critical, but for your average business user, it’s absolutely necessary.

Changes in this version, from the release notes:

• New storage architecture handles calendars with hundreds or thousands of events more responsively.
• More intuitive interface shows you more of what you need, and less of what you don’t.
• Redesigned preferences allow you to easily customize Sunbird for your needs.
• Add-ons support allows you to extend Sunbird’s functionality with extensions, themes, and language packs from addons.mozilla.org.
• New Windows installer makes it easier than ever for Windows users to install Sunbird.
• Better printing gives you more ways to print your calendars. Mac users can now print as well!
• 24-hour views show you your entire day, not just a few hours.
• Reliable alarms ensure you are notified about events or tasks.
• Improved localization support means Sunbird can easily install, enable, and disable language packs.
• Vastly improved reliability makes it much more difficult to lose data.
• Many performance improvements 

I’m liking the new add-ons support, and the new interface looks a lot more polished than previous releases.  The interface, especially the options & add-ons dialogs, are very similar to the Firefox versions.  This is a good move; the less users have to think about using the software, the more they’re likely to use it.

In other Mozilla news, Eudora, once the darling mail client, especially of the Mac world, has announced that they are going to be changing their codebase to use the Thunderbird software.  How this will interact with Thunderbird is not 100% clear at this point, but Eudora will remain a separate product completely owned by Qualcom & run by their staff.  Their project to merge the code is called Penelope & is hosted at mozilla.org

The “Penelope” project’s intention is to join the Eudora® user experience with the Mozilla platform. We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on mozilla and Thunderbird. It’s *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it.

We are committed to both preserving the Eudora user experience and to maintaining maximum compatibility, for both developers and users, with Thunderbird. It is our goal to build a single development community around Thunderbird and Eudora, so that both mailers advance faster than they previously have.