Gsoc applicant for Mozilla Thunderbird/Lightning Calendar Sync Project

[suryakant gokhale]

Hi,

I am Suryakant Gokhale a final year student of computer science at
Bits-Pilani, India.I am very much interested in the project aiming to sync
Calendar data from Thunderbird/Lightning to the Gnome-Panel Clock applet as
I really needed it back then when I shifted to ubuntu.
And to work on a project which you yourself really desire is great fun.


I have always interested and been reading about this calendar export stuff
in the community and have realized that already there many efforts in this
direction.
To name a few

1.) There is a thunderbird plugin called mirror evolution which basically
copies all your changes in the lightning calendar to the evolution data
server and hence events get displayed on the clock applet.
but it has limitations that on clicking edit for an appointment evolution
gets opened. there are workarounds but the whole thing becomes a mess.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9656

2.)Also there are quite a few plugins which provide two way syncing between
google calendar and thunderbird
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631

3.)lifehacker has an article on how to connect any client to google
calendar.
http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar



4.)This link is also a great treasure when it comes to thunderbird and the
clock applet
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-806472.html


Option no 1.) is simply too complex because it uses two clients to do the
same thing and could be very confusing for new users whcih is not good for
ubuntu.

Rest of the options are to synchronize one's online and offline lives as
best as possible.

Summarizing all the information above I think it is essential for ubuntu to
natively support Thunderbird/Lightning calendars in it's gnome-panel clock
applet.

1.) Since Thunderbird has better sync support with google calendar.
2.) Thunderbird is present on almost all  Operating systems so more users
migrating to ubuntu will be benefited
2.)Since google has started providing a sync client from Microsoft Outlook
to Thunderbird . Displaying Thunderbird events in clock essentially displays
one's outlook ( corporate :) ) events too.

Also I have a few suggestions regarding the current UI of the calendar
1.)use of small icons to denote types of events
2.)May be a search field at the top
3.)May be we can use ubuntu's new official notification system  notify-osd
to display alerts for one's calendar
4.) I Particularly like Rainlendar's Calendar may be we can borrow a feature
or two :)  mostly UI stuff

I am proficient in C and willing to extend my knowledge of  Gtk+ which are
going to help me in this project.
I have made a few changes to the clock applet and included a tooltip to show
a Tasks due date and Description to familiarize myself with the codebase.

Please find attached a patch for the same.

I would be absolutely delighted if given an opportunity to work for this
project and make life a bit easy for millions of users and myself.


Yours Sincerely,
Suryakant Gokhale
Birla Institute Of Science and Technology
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