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.