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

Filed under: Free Software, Thunderbird , google calendar, lightning 0.8, Thunderbird

Lightning 0.8 Release

I’ve been out of the office all day at the Adobe AIR On Tour Event in Brussels, but given the way the stats have rocketed for Lightning related articles on this blog it looks like Mozilla have finally released v0.8 of Lightning for Thunderbird and there might be the odd problem with tasks

I’ve been using the nightly builds of Lightning 0.8 and the Google Data Provider 0.4 for a few weeks now and I know there’s a lot of good stuff in there so it’ll be good to check out the final release tomorrow and see what the problem is (hopefully none or at least easy to fix).

I’ll post more tomorrow.

Filed under: Free Software, Support Articles, Thunderbird , lightning, mozilla, task management, Thunderbird

Top 6 Thunderbird Extensions – Free Fridays #10

If you’re not yet acquainted with it, Thunderbird is Mozilla’s desktop email client. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now as an alternative to Outlook because it’s more lightweight and seems to handle large volumes of mail better.

Mozilla’s philosophy is to build products that are lightweight on initial installation, which you then have the choice to extend later by downloading additional plug-ins which they call extensions.

These are the 6 extensions that I’ve found most useful over the years. All of the extensions mentioned run in current version of Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (20071031)

Lightning

Lightning provides calendering and task management for Thunderbird. You can multiple calendars to help separate work and private life and subscribe to or import external calendars.

It has all the Day, Week and Month Views that you’d expect of a decent calendar programme and if you set dates for your tasks, they will also appear in the calendar.

Thunderbird In Month View

Thunderbird In Week View

Download Lightning here addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

Provider For Google Calendar

The Google provider for Lightning enables it to not only subscribe to your Google Calenders, but to also write back information to Google. So if you an an event in Thunderbird, it’ll synchronise back to your Google calendar and vice versa.

At the moment the Google Provider for Lightning is only able to sync calendar events, not tasks. All of your tasks will have to be stored in a local calendar.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631

Duplicate Remover

As people change their email address or move around from company to company, you inevitably end up with some old or duplicate contact records in your address book.

The Duplicate Remover extension runs a check on all of the contacts in your address book and when it finds potential duplicates it presents them to you side by side with the option to delete one of them.

You can choose to ignore the suggested duplicates, edit the information in both or delete the suggested record. Unlike Apple’s address book, there’s no merge function, but I’m sure that’s top of their list for extending functionality the functionality.

It’s fairly quick, but of course that’ll depend on how many contacts you have, but you shouldn’t need to run it that often.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2505

Address Book Side Bar

One thing that is missing from the default installation of Thunderbird is a pane which enables you to quickly glance through a list of all your contacts and choose which ones to send the email to.

The Address Book Sidebar fulfils that role and can be called up whether you are creating a new message or not.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/70

Signature Switcher

If you use Thunderbird for work and private email or if you have to respond in different roles at work Siganture Switcher is a very handy tool that let’s you create a number of different signatures for signing off your emails and then choose which one you use at then end of each message.

But it goes beyond simply being able to manually choose which signature to append to a message. It can also be configured to automatically choose which signature to use based on who you are replying to or the recipients of a mailing list you are using to send out the email.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/611

MagicSLR

If you use Thunderbird to collect mail from more than one account MagicSLR is a handy little toll that enables you to hit one button and it send and receive all of your mail for all of your accounts.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/902

Toolbar Buttons

As you get more familiar with Thunderbird you’ll probably want to change the tool bar options to include the functions that you use most often. There are loads of functions available, but not all have a button, so you’ll need the Toolbar Buttons extenison.

Download: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2377

Filed under: Free Fridays, Free Software, Information Management, Reviews, Thunderbird , contacts sidebar, duplicate remover, extensions, lightning, mozilla, task management, Thunderbird

Find Missing Lightning Tasks In Thunderbird

If you use Lightning (0.7) you’ve probably had the frustration of entering some tasks in to your to-do list and then not being able to find them. It’s really quite simple to locate them, though the solution is not obvious always at first.

Save Tasks Locally

The first thing to note is that tasks have to be saved in a local calendar. With the current version of the Google Provider for Lightning, you cannot save tasks to a Google Calendar. So if you’re trying to figure out how to find the tasks that you entered in your Google calendar, the answer is simple. They just aren’t there. This post only covers tasks saved in a local calendar.

Switching Modes

When you installed Lightning on Thunderbird you probably noticed that there are two buttons used to switch between Mail and Calendar modes in the bottom left of the screen.

It’s quite natural to look for your missing tasks in calendar mode, but only tasks that you have set a start and end date for will appear in the calendar and then only in the week, multiweek and month views. Tasks do not appear in the day view.

Tasks of a general to-do list nature which don’t necessarily have a date set cannot appear in the calendar and there’s no obvious way to find them.

You have to switch to Mail mode and then press Ctrl+D [NOW F11 in v0.8]. This will bring up the Today Pane on the right hand side of your Thurderbird windows. Alternatively, you can go to the View menu >> Layout >> Today Pane.

When in Mail mode you can easily toggle between showing you tasks by using Ctrl+D [NOW F11 in v0.8].

Quickly Adding New Tasks

Now when you need to add a task, just double click on a blank area of the Today Pane and a New Task dialogue will appear. Proceed as normal and don’t forget to set the calendar for the task to one that is local.

Lightning 0.8 To Add Task View

The next version of Lightning, 0.8 will make access to tasks more intuitive by including as task pane as is found in the stand alone version, Sunbird.

[UPDATE] Lightning 0.8 was released on 7 April 08 read more about task in v 0.8 here

Filed under: Support Articles, Thunderbird , lightning, lightning 0.7, missing tasks, mozilla, task management, Thunderbird, to do list