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.

x2v: An XHTML-to-iCal tool

Via Kevin Marks, I found out about Brian Suda’s x2v calendar parsing tool. Kevin used it to provide a calendar page for Gnomedex back in June. I wonder how hard it would be to wrestle XHTML into vCalendar - and solve my Outlook import problems?

Hunting for two-calendar blogs

I'm hunting for two-calendar blogs. One calendar would be the usual way to access blog archives. The other would access events -- certainly future events, but maybe present and past events as well?

It doesn't make sense to have a single calendar to access both blog archives and events, does it?

If you've seen anyone who's implemented a two-calendar blog, drop us a line.

Upcoming.org adds support for groups

Upcoming.org added support for groups yesterday. Details here. Says Ed Vielmetti: "nicely enough the calendar comes out as RSS or iCal."

Outlook 2003: For iCal import, use Gregorian instead of Lunar?!

Well, as promised, I installed Outlook 2003, but it still can't import my .ics files (generated by Apple's iCal). I guess Trumba's business model is safe even from Outlook 2003, and Microsoft's Gnomedex demo is still just a starting point for them.

At least I received an interesting error message:

"Microsoft Office Outlook cannot import vCalendar file. This error can appear if you have attempted to save a recurring Lunar appointment in iCalendar format. To avoid this error, set the appointment option to Gregorian instead of Lunar."

Huh? Can anyone explain this? After digging around the Outlook 2003 help system, as well as the Web, I could not.

Monket Calendar needs a maintainer

Stephen O'Grady and others praise Monket Calendar, a cool open source application that generates calendars for the Web, but it needs a maintainer while its creator travels the world for a year.

PHP iCalendar

PHP iCalendar is a PHP-based iCal file viewer/parser to display iCals in a Web browser. Something else I should try out.

VTCalendar: Open-source iCal server

From MacMerc.com: "This gem comes courtesy of Virginia Tech. With VTCalendar you can manage your calendar on your own server. You can even divide your calendar into sub calendars by category and subscribe to your calendar(s) via iCal."
Swampdrain factor: +1. This may fulfill the important requirement for free iCal hosting as I mentioned in a pre-Swamp IMJ post.

Mediabee: "Family Calendaring Simplified"

River found this: Mediabee is Windows software with calendaring and a lot more. Product claim includes putting appointments and reminder "on any number of cell phones." No Swampdrain factor for this until I've learned some more. Meanwhile, there's a Mediabee Weblog, The Family Calendar Blog: "Family Calendaring Simplified."

Advice to Apple

Apple Insider reports about this Apple job posting for an iCal engineer:

"someone eager to take iCal to the next level and increase it's [sic]integration with other applications in Mac OS X"

Hey Apple, how about increasing calendar integration with the (still) dominant platform, Windows and Outlook? And hire a proofreader!