Thursday, March 13, 2008

Syncronization again

Google has, in some ways, beaten me to the punch. For this I am actually grateful, since they built the calendar service, and the GData API they should have figured it out before me.

Unfortunately they're doing so in a bit of a different way than I am going about it so we may still be leaving some people in the dust.

The Google Calendar Sync utility:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955

The nature of the tool requires you to be using Windows, and Microsoft Outlook which is problematic. I primarily use Linux with Thunderbird at home, and I have the Lightning Thunderbird plugin to allow me to use it for calendaring. At the office I do use Windows mostly, but spend some of my time in Linux and Evolution or using Entourage on the Mac. Google cannot help me here.
The utility itself is a compiled executable and Google has not release the code, so developers don't know how the tool works. The Terms of Service also prevent developers from reverse-engineering to find these things out, so our only hope is to ask Google how this thing does what it does.


On a related note I've been making some progress with my own sync tool, but Spring Quarter here at RIT just started so my time is growing slim. With any luck I should have a working beta within a few weeks, but that probably will have limited support for recurring appointments, at best.

-PXA

(Edit, I went to retag this and blogger.com ate some of my article. Looks like their regex got a little too greedy)

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