News.com:

The new project, code-named Lightning, aims to integrate Mozilla’s calendar application, Sunbird, with its recently released Thunderbird e-mail application. That integration is aimed right at the heart of Microsoft’s widely used Outlook software.

“I think Outlook leaves a lot of room for a fast competitor,” said a Mozilla volunteer involved in the project, who asked not to be named. “There’s a lot of user dissatisfaction out there, and it will be interesting to see what the market looks like once there’s a strong open-source alternative.”

I completely agree. Don’t get me wrong, I love Outlook as much as the next guy, especially with its tight integration with my Pocket PC. But even I recognize that Outlook is an extremely bloated application which offers far more functionality than I will ever use. It will be very interesting to see how Lightning will compare.

Of course, Microsoft has issued a typical “Why should we care!?” response:

Microsoft dismissed Mozilla’s pretensions to its Outlook throne, noting that the vast majority of enterprise Outlook users rely on Outlook’s integration with Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail server.

“Thunderbird does not offer an equivalent comparison to Microsoft Office Outlook,” Microsoft said in a statement. “Customers expect much…
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Sometime in the last couple of days, the Paint.NET team released version 2.0 of their impressive mspaint replacement program.

Of course, I could actually go to their site and find some text to copy/paste to here for myself, but at the time of writing, the site is bringing up a 403 error, as it’s probably been slashdotted to hell and back - so instead, I’ll shamelessly copy the slashdot post from the other day:

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft

I was one of the lucky few to visit the page and download the file for myself before their servers crumbled under the weight of untold thousands of geeks trampling all over them, and I have to say, the program really is quite impressive. Hopefully Microsoft see fit to release it instead of MSPaint in Longhorn.

You may still be able to find the software for download at this location, but no guarantees, as that may have been slashdotted too.

Hooray for geeks!

requires Windows XP with .NET Framework 1.1 installed, 800MHz CPU and 128MB RAM

Apple has officially announced the opening of the Canadian iTunes Music Store. Songs cost 99 cents Canadian, or roughly 84 cents US, which makes �the cost-per-song the lowest of all available localizations of the store.�, according to MacRumors.

News.com.com reports that Apple is opening a retail store in Toronto in 2005, their first in Canada.  There’s no word on other Canadian locations, but it’s a step in the right direction.  I just wish there were one on my side of the continent!