About

This is an add-on for Mozilla Thunderbird that displays birthdays from the addressbooks as events in Lightning.

Installation

Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/thunderbirthday/ and follow the installation instructions there.

Credits

A huge thanks to all contributors of this extensions!

• Philipp Kewisch -- The author of the google calendar provider, which served as skeleton for ThunderBirthDay
• Michael Kurz -- For the active testing and the support in bug smashing!
• edvoldi -- A very eager tester from www.sunbird-kalender.de/forum/
• Babelzilla and the translators there -- See datails in install.rdf
• www.icondrawer.com -- For making the duty free icon used for this extension

And many other testers...

Known issues

• calIItemBase.id

  • The ID is not unique yet. Until now, it is an MD5 hash of the Name, the birthday and the calendar's URI. This makes it pretty unique, but not entirely unique. One idea is to generate a random MD5 hash and save it in a new field with the nsIAddrDatabase interface.

• calICalendar.getItems()

  • Until now, the occurrences of a recurring item as returned by the TBD data provider do not have the same title as the base item. Users retrieving occurences with the calIItemBase.getOccurrencesBetween() will get occurrences with the same title as the base item (no age in parenthesis). Maybe implementing the calIItemBase interface is a solution...

• Anyway, if you read this and have any ideas, suggestions, critics or whatsoever, please let me know!

Possible new features

This list is not up-to-date. Please have a look at http://ingomueller.net/mozilla/thunderbirthday/wishlist for a more detailed and up-to-date version of this list.

• The description on AMO has to be improved: it has to be clear to the user that ThunderBirthDay provides a new type of calendar and that it doesn't just export events.

• Maybe we can use nsIAddrDBListener to track changes to the address book, so there is no need to refresh anymore, or at least, changes will be tracked immediately.

• Possibility to choose a user defined field where the birthday is stored instead of the mostly unaccessible fields birthday, birthmonth and birthyear. Maybe even possibility to choose format (dd.mm.yyyy).

• Possibility to choose between birthdays, anniversaries and both. Like the feature above, the coise can be stored in the calendar uri as paremters like this: moz-abmdbdirectory://abook.mab?type=birthday&field=user1

• Replace the modify dialog of events for TBD-calenders with the property dialog of the concerned addressbook card (not sure about that one yet).

• Maybe it's a good idea to create calendar with default settings when installing ThunderBirthDay, as some people don't seem to read the instructions carefully enough and don't know how it works then.

• Extend properties dialog of thunderbirthday-calendars, adding possibility to change addressbook, birthdate field and other settings.

• Implement alarms, with global and per calendar settings. Maybe the necessary data can be saved in new fields with the nsIAddrDatabase interface. Reminder-emails might also be a nice feature.

• Let the user set all kind of things, globally and per calendar: (1) the format of the events title, (2) category, ...

• A wish from a user: Possibility to have birthdays without the year being set. Not sure about how to implement this...

Resources for developers

• http://ingomueller.net/mozilla/thunderbirthday -- The projects home page
• http://rfc.net/rfc2445.html -- RFC2445 - Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar)
• http://mxr.mozilla.org/ -- Source code of Thunderbird and Lighting
• http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/calendar/base/public/calICalendar.idl -- Specification of the calICalendar interface - the main interface TBD is implementing.