Scheduling and calendars
email is important for just about anyone who works in an online world. many of us consider many email applications before settling on the best of the bunch but often a solution lacking all of what we’d want. the browser is another important application for internet geeks (e.g., is there really a choice beyond Firefox?). but for me, two of the more important uses of my computer are for scheduling needs and for my to do lists. i am a Macintosh user, so i am pretty happy with iCal — it comes free with the Mac OS. unfortunately, iCal is not great for a person who has to sync calendars with others and for a person who often uses lab computers, etc. so i switched to Google’s calendars back in April of ‘06. at the time, i noted that Google worked well with iCal. i was wrong. while Google’s calendar can import iCal calendars, it’s not a two way street and thus it is worthless to even try it. so i gave up on iCal. i missed the quickness of using iCal when i am on my main computer. i can make quick edits and additions when using iCal that take a bit longer on Google’s calendars. and Google is fast. however, i recently discovered Spanning Sync (SS). SS is a tool that will work on your Mac to automatically (or manually) sync Google’s calendars with your iCal calendars and visa versa. they have a demo here and it looks just beautiful. i have grabbed the public beta but unfortunately i just discovered that the DIGG effect is in full force. this little application had made the digg front page and the servers at SS couldn’t handle the load, so they closed down their beta offering for now. shucks. on the other hand, i find it interesting that the application will reside on your computer, yet it uses the SS servers to perform the sync. imagine the amount of data that SS will have access to (insert evil laugh here). ;~)
as far as my to do list . . . i’ll have to save that for another day, but suffice to say i’ve moved beyond a simple text document and i am still searching for the ideal solution.
Technorati Tags: iCal, calendar, scheduling, digg, Google, Spanning Sync
June 20th, 2007 at 9:18 am
I use the Palm OS with my Treo 650. My wife has a Palm as well….it’s actually my old one with WI-FI but I wanted to merge my cell phone and Palm so that I didn’t have to carry both of them.
I am hoping that the Google calendar will sync with my Palm so that we can sync our calendars easier as well. I also am hoping to start using Google calendars this upcoming school year so that my students can view the class calendar from anywhere in the world and hopefully they will create their own calendars as well. Thank you for the info on Google calendar. I look forward to using it this fall.