iPod iCal education curve

Comment spotted on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: "My iPod keeps spitting out the wrong times for my iCal reminders...can anyone tell me how to turn off iCal on the iPod?" UPDATE: I don't sync my iPod hardly at all, but River tells me it's simple to turn off calendar sync between a Mac and an iPod while the iPod is connected to the Mac. I posted an appropriate tip at TUOW. Could there be a learning curve for iCal on iPod? With millions of iPods already out there, Either the iPod calendar isn't that tough to figure out, or almost nobody's using it. (As for me, I won't use it as long as it's read-only.)

CalDAV standard approaches release

Lisa Dusseault: "We're getting very, very close with CalDAV."

I recorded an episode of Opening Move with Lisa earlier this month at ApacheCon. Look for it in January.

Technorati tag: CalDAV

A public ping server for events

Brian Dear is calling on all event Web sites to publish to a common public ping server for events. I second the notion. Anyone who can successfully take this forward might see a nice little payday down the road, if the recent sale of the weblogs.com ping server for blogs is a good precedent, and I think it is.

The benefits of creating such a common public ping server for general calendar interoperability could be a big win for calendar publishers and subscribers.

MacFixIt says some iCal calendars are disappearing

From MacFixIt:

"A growing number of users are reporting an issue where calendars disappear from iCal -- though individual meetings may still be viewable. It appears that many users experiencing this problem are using Mark/Space's Missing Sync software, which will synchronize some natively unsupported Palm devices with iCal."

There's no comment from Mark/Space in this report, nor any mention of the report on Mark/Space's Web site.

Whether there's a serious problem here or not, it points out the continuing need for simpler calendar synchronization solutions, with fewer moving parts.

Technorati tag: Missing Sync

Outlook 2003 to iCal: It works!

Well, today for the first time I've successfully sent calendar invitations from Outlook to iCal. I'm still not happy with the general state of things, but I'll explain more during the next Calendar Swamp podcast, which I'll record soon.

UPDATE: By the way, iCal to Outlook 2003 is still broken on my PC.

Calendars as a general case? Not so fast

Dan Farber: "As is generally the case with software, calendars are tethered to specific platforms, which makes it difficult to ensure interoperability."

Not so fast. Look at these data types in software which are already generally interoperable:

• Email
• Rich text files
• Comma-delimited data
• Tab-delimited data
• MP3 audio files
• RSS feeds & aggregators
• CAD formats
• PDF files
• HTML
• AVI video files

While more can be done in all the above areas, and in compound document interoperability, I object to sweeping generalizations that perpetuate the very acute interoperability problems that have vexed computer-based calendars ever since IBM's mainframe-based PROFS ceased to be the de facto standard.

Microsoft busts a move toward calendar sharing

While Microsoft's products continue to be the biggest calendar-sharing problem, solutions are coming in the form of SSE. I can't wait!

Technorati tag: SSE

Apple needs to do more too

How delightful to read John Welch's critique of Apple's calendaring effort, which could be better:

"While things like iCal, and Web client-only systems may work for a select few, in a modern enterprise it's not going to play. Things like delegation, public folders, real handheld support, instant messaging integration and the rest are not 'highfalutin' options anymore."

Missing Sync 5.0 marries Palm OS, Mac OS X Tiger

It's good to see the new Missing Sync for Palm 5.0, which should smoooth calendar synchronization between Palm OS devices and Macintosh OS X Tiger.

When 2.0: Let the mergers begin!

Too many Web 2.0 calendar services already? Let the mergers begin, at When 2.0, December 6, at Stanford University.

Technorati tag: When 2.0

Waiting for Google Calendar

Someone named Chris launched a blog devoted to the still-unannounced Google Calendar. The most interesting thing revealed so far is the fact that http://calendar.google.com is already a valid URL (with, so far, nothing else interesting about it). Google Base rumors indicate Chris has good timing.

Technorati tag: Google Calendar

Discovering SchoolBell

SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source licence. Today I discovered that one component of SchoolTool is SchoolBell, a free, open source web application to allow groups and organizations to coordinate the sharing of calendars, including iCal support. I found out about SchoolBell by listening to this IT Conversations podcast.

AirSet "debuted" at DEMO

AirSet had its official coming-out party at DEMO today. My opinion remains unchanged.

Microsoft's own calendars don't sync

Ex-Microsoft employee Mark Jen, quoted by Forbes: "MSN e-mail should talk to Office Calendar contacts and share appointments from Office with friends and family on the Web. But then MSN could cannibalize Office."

When Microsoft's own calendars don't sync with each other, we've got a long way to go.

Mysterious iCal success

Inexplicably, my copy of Outlook 2003 now exports iCal .ics files correctly. Maybe I had to be surrounded by a critical mass of Microsoft employees to solve this problem; it started working while I was in the press room at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference.

Zimbra: More open-source calendaring

Kevin Yank writes: "Zimbra, an extensible open-source client/server system for managing email, contacts, and calendaring...is Microsoft Exchange and Gmail rewritten in Java using open source technology… all free, cross-browser, and cross-platform." It runs on top of various open source software such as MySQL. This project will be worth watching.

iTunes 5 lets iPod sync with Outlook

Apple: "iTunes 5 now also supports contacts syncing via Outlook or contacts and calendar syncing via Outlook Express for the PC." My copy of Outlook Express doesn't have calendaring at all. Is this a mix-up?

Take the CalConnect survey

Quoting CalConnect:

"The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium has identified a need for more interoperability and data exchange between event calendars in the future. This survey is an initial effort to categorize the current state of event calendaring. It endeavors to find out what types of event calendars are in use, the features that are important and what type of systems are used to host and run event calendars. Once collected, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium will aggregate and analyze the responses. This information will then be used to help establish more event calendar technical standards as well as further clarify interoperability needs."

All about vCal

The top result for a "vCal" search on Google is the page "vCard and vCalendar." It's owned by The Internet Mail Consortium, which has a snail-mail address in Santa Cruz, California. What brought this to mind was a page I found today that describes FreeConference.com, a free conference call service. Here's the interesting part:

"After you've configured your conference call, you can invite people directly from within FreeConference.com's interface, at which point FreeConference.com generates an email invitation to each person you've entered...the email invitations come with vCal file attached that the recipient can drop into iCal or Outlook to add to her calendar."

Hmm, if only I could create vCal files. But from within Outlook 2003, trying to save an appointment as vCal or iCal yields the message, "The operation failed."

I still have Palm Desktop, but the "export vCal" option is grayed out. I'm happy for FreeConference though, if in fact what they have works as described.

Good news: AirSet adds Palm sync support

Walt Mossberg this week reviewed Trumba and AirSet. Of the two, only AirSet supports synching calendars with the Palm OS as well as Outlook and iCal. The Palm support is new so I'll give AirSet a Swampdrain factor of +2. Why not a higher score? After all, AirSet is a free service. It's because calendar synchonization should not require any of us to store all our calendars on an intermediary computer. The end-to-end nature of the Internet demands nothing less. But the new feature set of AirSet is another step forward.