Orange is my favorite color

Mozilla just released Sunbird and Lightning 0.8, the calendar project of the Mozilla Group. I’ve been using the combination of Thunderbird, Lightning/Sunbird and a GTD tool called ThinkingRock for over a year now. The problem is that my calendar files have grown and the calendar would take sometimes as long as 5-10 seconds to switch from month to month. A real usability drag.

But I just installed Lightning 0.8 into Thunderbird 2.0 and fired it up and not only is the new task pane and conversion between mail, tasks and events really neat, the thing FLIES. I can switch between months now in less than a second and the visual design of the application continues to be polished. The speed has been my only complaint about what is otherwise a great piece of software. Kudos to the team for making big strides over the past year.

If you’re looking for a well-integrated GTD solution, my combination of Thunderbird (mail), Lightning/Sunbird (calendar) and ThinkingRock (GTD tasks/projects) has worked really well. ThinkingRock exports an iCal file of your appointments and tasks which I load into Thunderbird as a remote calendar. Then BirdieSync pulls the appointments and tasks from Thunderbird into my Windows Mobile 5 phone so I have full access to everything at all times. This is, unfortunately, read-only access from the mobile but there is a Pocket PC extension for ThinkingRock that I have not yet tried.

2 Comments

  1. Kevin Crenshaw said:

    on April 9, 2008 at 7:30 am

    Nice suggestion. We maintain the Comprehensive GTD Software Comparison List (96 researched titles and growing). Your article makes me think we should add a section for hybrid GTD solutions. But how would we track all the combinations? Maybe just have linkbacks to articles like this that describe them…?

  2. brian said:

    on April 9, 2008 at 9:26 am

    @Kevin – maybe it’s not an entire section dedicated to hybrids but rather links to resources on how to combine an individual tool (in this case, say ThinkingRock) with other components of a personal system like mobile phones, email, calendar, etc? Getting a GTD tool is kind of the first step in actually implementing it in your life… since we rarely have a laptop in front of us when genuis strikes. :)

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