[prathapml]

Yes, the mozilla fans among you might already know, but its posted here for the benefit of the rest of the community.

Background - I saw in my news feed that Mozilla Sunbird v0.5 was released - LINK. (its a standalone calendar-ing & appointments tool, somewhat like what MS Outlook is, but without the bloat)
I had used it earlier as well, but now it seems to be much easier on the eyes & stable - fit for everyday use. So I decided to give it a go (my Emails/RSS are managed thru Opera M2, no calendar tool on this PC as yet) and liked it. The only thing missing, is a facility to minimize it to the system tray (that area to the left of your windows system clock at bottom-right). Now if it cant be sent to the background as a tray icon, then its useless as I dont want it occupying space on my taskbar as an open window all the time. Knowing that an extension exists to fix this, I downloaded MinimizeToTray. But it does not support Sunbird v0.5.

The solution -
1. Download the extension file first (minimizetotray-0.0.1.2006102615+-fx+zm+sb+tb.xpi).
2. Rename file to add a .ZIP to filename, and extract into a folder, using WinRAR/WinZIP.
3. Now go into that folder, open "install.rdf" using notepad.
4. Search for "0.3" (you will notice that there is a minimum & maximum version number assigned there), change it to "0.5"
5. Save the file & zip it all up, as it was before, then rename it as "anyfilename.XPI".
6. Now you can open Sunbird, go to Tools > Addons, drag-n-drop this XPI file into the addons dialog-box, and MinimizeToTray will install without any incompatibility.
7. From now, you can left-click the minimize button to minimize to taskbar (as usual), or right-click it to minimize to system tray.
A small bug remains, due to this extension, that sunbird opens 2 windows each time it starts the first time. But I can live with it till its fixed, I guess.
Similarly, when you know that any other extension for firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey/seabird clearly does support your version of program, but still refuses to install simply because of the author hard-coding a min/max version into it, this method can be used to fix it.

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Background - I keep re-formatting my C: drive pretty much every 3 days. So I want it to be portable & not lose the data stored in Sunbird at such times (Sunbird stores all your profile data in this folder: "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Sunbird\profile" )

The solution -
1. Open notepad, type this: sunbird.exe -profile defaults\profile
2. Save it as open.cmd into the same folder where you installed Sunbird (ProgramFiles?).
3. Whenever you want to run Sunbird, just go to that folder & click OPEN.CMD and it will run as a portable, self-contained program. (if you want to run it thru StartMenu or create *.LNK shortcuts, then the application switch mentioned in Step1 should be a sufficient hint)
4. You can move the Sunbird folder to any location on your hard-disk, and all profile data will still be present inside that folder even after re-formats.








Hoping these 2 tips together help more people to discover this application & continue using it safely.

This post has been edited by prathapml: 09 July 2007 - 12:01 PM

[Zxian]

Yay!!! Prathapml is back!!!

Thanks for the tip buddy. I might try this out later on. Any idea if the process also works for Linux?

[prathapml]

Hehe, thank you Zxian I always was hovering around here though, never really went anywhere. Its just that the new topics nowadays all seem to be asking the same questions, whose answers were worked out (with everybody collaborating) ages ago!

Hmm, I admit I haven't run this on linux, but the "-profile" switch should work on linux too, for all mozilla apps (you'd usually use this method to customise your firefox distro for unattended deployment, run your app once, drag all your required extensions into it, and then close it, and thereafter run it in normal mode, all users will receive the customizations and they can take it forward from there onwards).
As for the MinimizeToTray extension though, I think it is windows-only.

Also, this is a very good resource - http://www.frontmoti...x/fmfirefox.htm

This post has been edited by prathapml: 09 July 2007 - 05:59 PM