Organize Your Life With Lightning

Mozilla has finally released a decent calendar add-on for it’s answer to email management, Thunderbird. It’s still in very early development (only 0.3 now), but Lightning shows a lot of promise. Installation takes about two seconds and requires one Thunderbird restart to apply… assuming you’ve already installed the Windows update for the new Daylight Savings Time annoyance. If not, and you’re on Windows, add 5-10 minutes just to sift through Microsoft’s “knowledge base” to discern which link is the actual download, and install that first. /rolls eyes

When you fire Thunderbird back up again, you’ll see a new panel built into the sidebar beneath where your email folders are, giving you quick-click access to your upcoming appointments, to-do list, and a full calendar. Lightning offers views for day, week, and month, along with standard features like recurrence, alarm, status and priority settings for every event you enter.

You can also create multiple calendar instances, add preset holiday calendars, and import any of your existing calendars from iCal. Sorry, no Outlook support yet because, well, Microsoft doesn’t play nice. Customization is limited at this point, unless you want to crack open a .jar file. I for one don’t know the first thing about .jar files, so I’ll have to live with the default color scheme (which isn’t bad) and alarm sounds until/unless Mozilla decides to make customizing a little more intuitive.

In addition, Lightning has sync capabilities with your mobile phone, iPod or whatever. Thanks to the release of this extension, Mozilla now has a great answer to Outlook - at least for personal organization and/or small business needs. Having switched to OpenOffice long ago, Outlook is the last standing MS application on my machine, (other than the wretched OS). Now I can freely ditch that too. All the better for when I switch to Mac in October.

Tags: add-ons | thunderbird | utilities