Hallelujah! Bump now lets iPhones share events

It's a joyous day here at the Swamp. Bump for the iPhone now allows direct sharing of events with other iPhones. Stay tuned for some followup analysis of just how much of my own swamp has been newly drained. (Quite a lot, I suspect.)

Rain in the clouds

From the Spanning Sync blog:

"Data loss and corruption is a serious problem for Google Apps users. Browse through the Google Apps help forums and you'll find hundreds of posts from users who have lost their data and need help."

Of course, Spanning Sync has a new product designed to help you keep your data safe, so take this pitch with a grain of salt. But the myth of your data being safer in the cloud than in the device you're carrying is looking a bit shopworn. Those of us who want our calendar data always available ignore this news at our peril.

The Scheduled Web, and more on thin CalDAV servers

It's been a quiet month but two things caught my attention ... within minutes of each other:

• Nova Spivack's blog post from May 6: The Birth of the Scheduled Web.
• Lincoln's comment (and the previous 7 comments) on my October 2008 post, Quest for a Thin CalDAV Server.

I'm also still contemplating what can be accomplished with the new CalDAV support in my iPhone 4.0 software. Is anyone out there doing any interesting and new calendar sharing with it? Or just untethering more from PC-and-Mac-based iTunes?

Sharing calendars via Facebook? Tighten your settings

If you use Facebook to share calendar info with others, you must read my first column for Windows Secrets, all about how to tighten your Facebook privacy settings.

Sorry Nexus One phone owners: No .ics support in calendar

Calendar Review reports that Android-based calendars on the Google can't handle meeting invites sent by .ics file -- a standard way people have been inviting people to meetings and activities for many years.

The workaround for Nexus One users, of course, is to deal with the invites from a Google Web calendar...but, what a pain!

After last week's news that Android has no calendar API, it's time for me to award -2 SwampDrain points to Google and Android collectively.

I wonder if Google is simply hoping everyone adopts hCalendar. Good luck with that! Better to support the old and the new and urge people to modernize, rather than try to force the change.

I wonder if other Android-based calendars are similarly unable to read .ics files. One commenter in my post on the Droid calendar search problem noted that Android-based phone provider HTC provides its own calendar instead of the standard Android one, so maybe HTC's calendar not only provides in-calendar search, but .ics file support as well. Does anyone reading this know?

hCalendar data now appears in some Google search results

I noted with interest an April 28 post at the Microformats blog, stating that Google now supports hCalendar. This Google Webmaster Central blog post from January 22 suggests that more and more Google search results are including hCalendar-formatted event information which may more easily flow into our calendars. However I have yet to experience this in my everyday Googling. If you have reaped any benefit from this, please leave a comment here.

Developers can't access Android calendar data, but iPhone situation improves

For a company that boasts about how open it is, Google has just done a great about-face on one front: calendar-sharing. According to Fabrizio Capobianco:

"There is no public calendar API on Android. Unbelievable."

In the same post, Fabrizio reports that Apple's iPhone OS is going to open up the iPhone calendar for developers. At least that was what Apple promised at the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. Maybe now we can hope for a working version soon of direct iPhone-to-iPhone calendar-sharing via Bump.

Tungle adds directories, group meetings

Anyone reading this using Tungle? If so, you'll be interested in today's news from the company. The TechCrunch post I'm pointing to here also mentions Jiffle, another Web-based calendar-sharing competitor I hadn't heard about.

GooSync free version returns

The free version of GooSync is back on the market six months after it was discontinued in favor of a paid version. GooSync is a server based synchronization service that allows you to synchronize many mobile devices over-the-air with Google Calendar, as well as Google tasks (as Google widgets) and Google contacts.

Eben Moglen sounds alarm about cloud-based calendar sharing

Free software advocate Eben Moglen raises troubling questions about placing one's calendar in the cloud.

Now Up-To-Date company closing

Now Up-To-Date, an obscure calendar/contact management system for Mac and Windows, is heading into history with the recent announcement that publisher Now Software is closing its doors. I only wrote about it once here, way back in 2005. BusyMac has a way to migrate Now Up-To-Date users to the Mac-only BusyCal.

iSchedule draft published at the IETF

From July 2008:

The iSchedule Technical Committee will develop a proposal for the Internet Scheduling Protocol (iSchedule) which will specify a binding from the iCalendar Transport-independent Interoperability Protocol (iTIP) to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

March 8, 2010: The first draft proposal for iSchedule is published by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Calendar standards folks, feel free to explain the significance of this in the comments to this post!

Amahi home network calendar sharing

FLOSS Weekly just posted a show about Amahi, a home network calendar sharing server. It requires a PC running Linux, and sounds like a summer project to someone like me, but it's encouraging to see some movement on the home network calendar-sharing front. Has anyone reading Calendar Swamp installed Amahi? If so, please post a comment here.

Ill-mannered app disables Google calendar sync

According to the Spanning Sync blog, bad behavior from a single application was causing all syncs to and from Google Calendar to fail for calendar users.

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.

Getting categorial about the iPhone calendar

Following up on the update to my last post, the native iPhone calendar can assign new events to a category, but only if that category is created by iCal for the Mac (or presumably Outlook) and then synched to the iPhone. If you don't use either iCal for the Mac or Outlook, no categories on the iPhone. I wonder if the rumored Apple tablet will allow category creation independently? That in itself wouldn't be enough to get me to buy a tablet, however. I just want the iPhone calendar to do it without a mind-meld with either Outlook or iCal for the Mac.

Update: Well I stand corrected! After doing a few more syncs, I was able to bring multiple calendars onto the iPhone and now can create new events using any of those calendars. This works because Google Sync is mimicking the Exchange (Outlook) protocol on its end. So it works! Categories rock!! (Just they originally did on the Palm calendar.) And yes, Windows Mobile was playing catchup.

Nuevasync does handheld tricks with multiple Google calendars

Kudos to Nuevasync to close out the year and match the kudos I gave the company at the start of 2009. This time, Nuevasync allows Windows Mobile calendar users to assign a Google calendar to a category in their WinMo calendar, making it easy to manage multiple Google calendars in the (Windows) palm of one's hand. Let's see the iPhone do that! (It can't: the iPhone native calendar doesn't have categories.) The new Nuevasync service is $25 a year -- a fair price.

Score one for Windows Mobile ... after a verry long drought!

Update: It's true, as a commenter to this post says, that the iPhone can merge multiple Google calendars into one iPhone calendar. But the new Nuevasync also lets mobile users assign events to a particular category which then feeds back into respective category, and the native iPhone calendar (still) can't do that.

State of the Swamp, 2010

There's still so much swamp to be drained.

Latest case in point: I'm preparing to attend my first Consumer Electronics Show in five years. For years, CES and similar trade shows have provided a Web-based event planner to add show activities to a personalized calendar. After selecting their events, attendees have a choice to export this calendar, purportedly to iCal format.

This I did today. But like so many other supposed iCal files, this one can't be properly imported into standard iCal-compliant calendars such as Google Calendar or Mozilla.

At least at the beginning of 2010, we have a new diagnostic tool, the iCalendar Validator. Running my exported CES file through the Validator reveals that the file scored 75 out of 100 points, accompanied by this warning: "This calendar has major problems; many applications will reject this calendar."

I would guess that one application will accept the calendar just fine: Microsoft Outlook. But looking at the text of the CES calendar, the beginning states "BEGIN:VCALENDAR BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0."

vCal is an older, less forgiving version of the iCal standard. It's been the topic of a long comment thread here. It's sad that organizations of the stature and importance of the Consumer Electronics Association (producers of CES) are still using vCal, and worse that it gets billed as iCal when only Outlook iCal is likely to be speaking that dialect.

I wonder if it's possible to use simple search-and-replace commands in Notepad to make the CES calendar work in Google Calendar. I'm going to try. But all the time, I will be wondering, after this year of cloud computing, how come the top U.S. technology show doesn't support the top cloud calendar format?

Update: If one views the source code of the CES Web site, it's obvious that it is created using the /Microsoft ASP.net format. The incompatibility culprit here is Microsoft!