Changes in Lightning 0.8 Tasks

Some of you may be experience some problems with not seeing your tasks pane in Thunderbird now that the new version of Lightning has been release.

The key things to know about tasks are:

• Tasks must be stored in a local calendar. They cannot be synced to Google Calendar.
• If tasks have no date information, they will not and cannot appear on the calendar.
• The Today Pane is now accessed/hidden by pressing the F11 key (or View > Layout > Today Pane)
• You need to be in the Mail view NOT the calendar view to see your tasks in the Today Pane

If you were running Lightning 0.7 and have upgraded to 0.8, you must also upgrade to 0.4 of Provider for Google Calendar if you want to continue syncing your calendars.

If the Today Pane (seen right) doesn’t look like it did before, you can cycle through different view to try to get it back to the way you like.

You’ll also notice at the bottom of this screen that you can quickly just type a new task. But if the currently selected calendar isn’t set to your local tasks list then anything you add here will be lost!

Check to see what calendar is currently set to the default by clicking on the “New Event” button (see the top of the picture). Annoying I know. It defeats the purpose of having a quick entry screen, unless you set the default calendar and then add multiple entries.

Prefixing the tasks with the name of a local calendar (the one you uses for storing your tasks) and ten adding a colon seems to work.

E.g. To-dos (work) : Write blog post about Lightning does seem to add the task to my local calendar called To-dos (work) which I use to store all my tasks.

Lightning 0.8 does not run on Thunderbird v1.5

You can get Lightning 0.8 at www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/

You’ll also need the latest version of Provider for Google Calendar addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631