RasterWeb!

In Calendar Woes (Part 1) we got some useful feedback, most of all from Steve Ivy who let us know that “iCal will not give you write access to calendars that you are subscribed to” – gee, thanks Apple!

So with a happy Mozilla Sunbird solution just like Jon Udell has (except I’m using Mac OS X, not Windows) what’s the deal with iCal? Well, there’s a few deals with iCal… And a few problems. Keep reading…

The main one is that iSync is now a part of my life. I use it to sync my calendar with my Nokia phone. With iCal seeing just one calendar, I could not add it to iSync. I had to create a dummy calendar just to allow iSync to use my real calendar. But wait, there’s more… It’s not enough to just set up it and leave it. I also have to actually launch iCal so it will pull down the latest version of my calendar via it’s subscription before it will be updated properly for iSync to send it to my phone. So the process of syncing my calendar is to launch iCal so it can download my subscribed calendar, and then run iSync. Two steps. I guess I should start writing AppleScript again…

It seems as thoough the same problem exists with syncing my calendar with the iPod. Launch iCal first to get the latest calendar changes, then sync. I tend to use my phone calendar rather than iPod calendar, so it’s not a big deal if the iPod is out of sync, though it would be nice for it to be in sync, right?

Don’t worry folks, I’m sure I’ll have more Calendar Woes to discuss in the future…

Yup, another one… Webjay Acquired by Yahoo!

That makes another person I know a Yahoo! employee. (Congrats Lucas!) Someday everyone will work for Yahoo!

I knew there was a reason XSPF was on my watch list for 2006.

(Meanwhile Google releases a bunch of software for Window XP. Remind me again which company “gets” the web?)

(Update: See Also: Yahoo! Music Welcomes Webjay and Lucas Gonze)

This post is testing the Performancing for Firefox extension…

So far I’m not liking it… but maybe that’s just me…

I’ve been ignoring Dave’s NewsRiver mainly because I don’t like the “river of news” style aggregator (see Puddle of News) but I figured, “Hey, let’s give it a whirl!”

First impressions, Dave should really hook up with a designer. Someone who can write valid XHTML and can sling the CSS with the best of them. Besides that, it’s a classic Frontier-style fractional horsepower HTTP application.

But, um, Dave… No Atom support, eh? So much for standards… :(

I’ve been experimenting with calendars much more than usual lately (this will probably be the first in a series of posts) and things are not working out as I’d like them to…

I’ve been using Mozilla Sunbird and it’s been working pretty darn good. I started with Sunbird long ago instead of Apple’s iCal because the systems I was running at the time were not running the version of Mac OS X needed to run iCal. Anyway, I’ve gotten used to Sunbird over the years, and I like it. (Plus, it’s open-source.)

My calendar is stored on my server and I subscribe to it using WebDAV. (I believe the webcal:// protocol is really just WebDAV, correct me if that is wrong.) So I use Sunbird to subscribe to my calendar and edit it, and read it, and it all seems to work ok.

Enter iCal. For reasons I’ll get into next time, I’m trying to use iCal. iCal can subscribe to my remote calendar, but can’t seem to make changes to it. Is this a limitation of iCal? Is my WebDAV server configured wrong? It works fine in Sunbird… Argh…

I then though I’d test creating a calendar in iCal and publishing it to my WebDAV server. That worked, but when I subscribed with Sunbird, and added an event, it got wiped out as soon as I reloaded the remote calendar, so it seems like Sunbird cannot write to the calendar that was published out from iCal. Does iCal hold the “master copy” and just publish out a new version to the WebDAV server each time? Argh…

So right now I’m not really using iCal for any editing or adding, just for reading, and I have to do this, and I’ll get into this next time, but for now, Sunbird does a good job of editing my remotely stored calendar, so I’ll keep using it.

One more note: I have no idea how .mac works. Does it do the right thing? I’m guessing you need to take the route of creating and publishing out a calendar from iCal, and then it all works seamlessly. Can you subscribe and edit with Sunbird or other apps? Question, questions…

(See also: Calendar Woes (Part 2))