We recently rolled out some updates to gowebtop and want to let you know what’s new!

The big news is that Laszlo Calendar is now 1.0! After releasing a preview a few weeks ago, we’re thrilled to release 1.0. In 1.0, we’ve added the following features to make your life even easier!

• Event Smartobjects! You can drag an event into an email compose window, where your event will appear as an attachment. While non-webtop users will see it as an iCal file, Webtop users can drag it into their Calendar and it’ll create the event for them
• You can now set reminders so you don’t forget an upcoming event
• You can now change which calendar an event belongs to
• You can now define a URL to link to information about an event
• We’ve added scroll bars so you can see more in Day and Week view
• And we’ve added a “Today” button to make navigating faster and easier

We also added some new features to the other applications, Laszlo Mail is now version 2.2 and Contacts is now version 1.2. The major changes include:

• When you select a contact in Contacts we now give you a button that makes it easy to see what operations you can do with the record
• Picture SmartObjects! You can click on image file attachments to see a preview before downloading. Previews can be shown for all common image formats including .jpeg, .gif, .ping and more
• Improved Contact SmartObjects! You can send contact information by dragging them into the email as an attachment. While non-webtop users will see it as a .vcf file, Webtop users can simply drag attachments into Contacts. If you drag the content to the To, CC or BCC field, the email address will be added to the sender list of the message
• We made the Preferences panel easier to find. With our growing number of applications (and there are more coming!), the preferences panel is now accessible in the upper right corner of Webtop. New improvements will also make it easier for third party developers to add preference settings for new applications
• The time of the last auto-save is now displayed in the footer of the mail compose window

There’s more coming soon, too!

We’re always interested in your thoughts and suggestions. Feel free to let us know what you think about gowebtop and what you’d like to see us add at new features or applications — drop us an email at feedback _at_ gowebtop.com.

Chuq
Webmaster, Laszlo Systems

Laszlo Calendar is an application that is deployed within Webtop. Laszlo Webtop applications are written in OpenLaszlo on the client-side and typically Java on the server-side (although you can write apps that talk to alternate back-ends).

goWebtop deployment
We have a specific Webtop deployment on www.gowebtop.com. We deploy on Gentoo Linux, x86 64bit hardware with the following software:

• Apache HTTP Server with mod_jk
• Apache Tomcat
• Laszlo Webtop
• Cyrus (IMAP)
• SendMail (SMTP)
• Barracuda (spam identification)

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Open Source credits
We are pleased to be part of several open source communities. Many thanks to those who build and maintain this software. In addition to the software noted above and our previous credits, the Laszlo Calendar includes several open source libraries.

Unlike Laszlo Mail which connects to a variety of IMAP and SMTP servers, we chose to integrate a calendar engine since most of our customers do not already host a calendar server. After evaluating a number of open source and proprietary servers, we decided to integrate Cosmo from the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF).

Cosmo is part of the Chandler project. We liked the fact that we could use the CalDAV standard, and that Cosmo supports publishing a CalDAV collection as a single .ics file that can users can subscribe to via external calendar clients. Also, in evaluating scalability, we found that Cosmo performance outpaced other solutions.

iCal4j

Laszlo Calendar also uses iCal4j, an open source Java library used to read and write iCalendar data streams as defined in RFC2445.

Our Webtop family has grown to include a personal Calendar, a perfect complement to Laszlo Mail and Contacts. As we said earlier, Calendar is the most requested application and, while we’ve taken a lot of time to get this right, we have decided to release it a little early — as a Preview — because we want to know what you think.

There is a lot to experience on goWebtop but here’s a few highlights:

• Check out the cool transitions between Day, Week and Month views
• Quickly drag and drop in day or week view to quickly create or move events
• Easily edit details for an event in the details panel. Set events to recur, change the start and end time, go all-day etc.
• Add and subscribe to loads of Calendars: Make sure you check out icalshare.com and add whatever interest you.
• Share your Calendar: Easily publish your calendar so others can see it. Just select your calendar, click publish, copy the URL and send it out to friends so they can subscribe to it. Simple.
• Jump around … on the mini-calendar
• Take a step back and admire the newly implemented z-ordered windows for Mail, Contacts and Calendar. Bring any window or app to the front at anytime.
• We’ve also beefed up the help so you can get a good overview of all the features
• Check out some of the screen shots to get a quick idea of what it looks like - recommend you try it and see what it’s like - it’s free
• We’ve also added a FAQ to answer some of the more traditional questions, so let us know if something is missing

This Calendar preview is for exploring, testing and impressing friends, family and pets. While we plan to migrate your calendar entries to future deployments, remember this is beta software, so make sure you keep your important events stored in an alternative location.

More features are coming in the final 1.0 product but are not in this preview release:

• Unique event SmartObject! You will be able to drag an event into an email compose window, where your event will appear as an attachment. While non-webtop users will see it as an iCal file, Webtop users can simply drag attachments into their Calendar.
• Set reminders so you don’t forget an upcoming event
• Handy ‘Today’ button
• Change which calendars an event is associated with

Let us, and everyone else, know what you think — your feedback will help us make it even better.

We will have some exciting news for goWebtop shortly as we will be adding a new member to the family. This is the most popular requested application by users so far and we’ve been working long hours to get it right. What is it? It is a new Calendar designed specifically to work with Mail and Contacts within Webtop. Well, it looks amazing and we are sure you’ll love it - especially if the feedback so far is any indication. You’ll won’t have to wait long as we are going to put up a preview on goWebtop, but in the meantime we’ve made some more enhancements to Mail, read on…

More HTML fanciness
We’ve finally moved beyond viewing HTML for Internet Explorer for Windows by adding Firefox and Safari support for Mac and Windows when it comes to viewing HTML-based email. This way you get to see all those fancy emails from your favorite airline, hotel and just about any other subscription you can poke a stick at, in all its glory.

Super fast delete
OK, so we’ve made deleting multiple messages much quicker than before. Try selecting a number of emails, hit delete and watch them disappear – in a flash!

Mac “Scroll Wheel”
That’s right, but this came for free because of the hard work by the OpenLaszlo platform team. OL now passes the scroll wheel information from the browser to the runtime - way to go. Thanks.

Last week’s update resolved lots of small complaints and a few big ones. Most of our work centered around making up for some of the limitations and “features” of web browsers and Flash.

So-called Security
IE7 introduced extra security for downloads, where it would show additional UI (the yellow bar) across the top of the browser with special controls of whether to block or permit downloads from this website. I don’t really understand why the dialog box which you can accept or cancel isn’t enough, but someone at Microsoft thought not. Additionally, when you allow a download using the yellow bar, it reloads the page. No big deal in for an old-school HTML web app, but in a Flash or Ajax application reloading the page loses context. The net result being that when you would download a zip file attached to your email on IE7, sometimes, the first time in a session, when your security setting were set just-so, the app would reload and you would need to go find that particular message again to download the attachment. Ugh. Now, we have a lovely interstitial dialog on IE which prevents that.

When Pop-ups are for Good, not Evil
We also, at long last, added pop-up blocker detection. With pop-up blocking built into the browsers these days, it has become more of an issue for new users that sometimes application interface controls just appear to fail when they happen to be triggering a new window. Now, if your action is being blocked, we’ll let you know that you want to turn off your pop-up blocker — we promise not to abuse you with pop-up ads! And, watch out, IE folks, changing pop-up blocker settings will, of course, reload the page. We added in an extra IE-specific reminder for that. Sigh.

HTML email is here to stay
Once upon a time, email was composed of letters, words and attachments. If you wanted inline images, there was always ascii art. Tables, css, and such were rarely seen in emails 3 or 4 years ago. Now, fancy HTML is found in every inbox. From holiday cards to bank statements, email can look like the colorful pile of paper still delivered by the postman on foot. We’ve always supported viewing HTML for Internet Explorer, the dominant browser, but as Firefox has gained popularity, we plan to address this cross-browser. Naturally, the Flash-browser blood-brain barrier is a minefield of ill-defined and broken behavior. Never fear, we’re building bridges and digging ravines, so Webtop users and develops will be able to navigate without concern. We’re also looking to soup up our HTML editing, but in the meantime, we’ve added the option to attach the original message, rather than forwarding inline when formatting would be lost in translation.

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