Plancast: So far, yet another patch of swamp

So after reading Dave Winer's plug for Plancast, I signed up.

This helps me how? I can visit this site and see friends' upcoming event schedules, but I can't subscribe to iCal feeds of these schedules. Calendar Swamp awards Plancast a SwampDrain penalty of -1 point. Just say no to visiting yet more Web sites to look at event info!

The always-in-sync question

While we try to get all calendars to share with each other -- a struggle with no end in sight -- progress occurred in another area: how to get a calendar in your pocket that's always in sync with a cloud-based calendar.

Apple's MobileMe for the iPhone was one of the first services offered to make this a reality. But MobileMe costs extra money, and yet it's still not always up and running.

Now here comes Google's Android platform, and at least one (or is that every?) Android phone out there that apparently keeps the local calendar in continuous sync with Google Calendar on the Web, at least according to Tim O'Reilly. Quoting Tim:

"No need to sync address book and calendar. Everything's always up to date."

And unlike MobileMe, there's no extra charge for this.

UPDATE: And as reader John Gordon points out, no Android required here. Just Google Calendar and Google Sync, on any mobile device they already support. Here all this time I didn't realize it!

Power Search fills Android calendar search gap

My quick scan of news about the Google Nexus One phone reveals no word of in-calendar search in this supposedly greatest Android phone ever. But I dug around some more and found a free third-party Android plug-in called Power Search, released last fall, that provide this feature across various Android phone local data. So while it's still ridiculous for Google not to provide this feature natively in Android, at least there are ways to get this local search, apparently.