Google Calendar in my Palm


I have been using Google Calendar for the past month. One of the best features of Google's calendar is the fact that you can own, administer or simply view more than one calendar at a time. The information is colligated together and presented as one. Which is great for sharing individual family / co-workers calenders and see other events, like bank holidays, without having to add them to my individual calendar.

On my Palm T3 I had been using Datebook 5 categories to capture calendar information for my family by my self. But how cool it would be to have others provide their entries for me...

Ideally I would simply synchronise several different calendars, each assigned to a different category to my Palm...

After some searching I found the following Palm-OS to Google calendar sync possibilities:

  • GooSync, alas the very limited help available suggests it will only sync your primary calendar, only works over an Internet connection and the sync goes via their servers. Cost FREE.

  • CompanionLink: Will sync the primary calendar but this one uses a conduit program on Windows and connects directly to google, no man-in-the-middle to share my private data with (Google's safe right! (I'm kidding....)). Costs $30.

  • CalendarPublish: Currently trying this on my T3, though they have told me its unsupported. It requires IBM's WebSphere Java EME whoms Preference settings screen cause my T3 to crash! Otherwise it's almost ideal as it allows me to sync my primary calendar and 5 others.  Alas It identifies the 'others' not by placing those items in separate categories but rather it appends notes to the individual palm entries. These notes contain extra data, including the private Google URL it came from. Costs $20

Looks like I'll need to wait a little longer for my ideal solution to emerge...

 

Posted on: Nov 10, 2006

Posted by: ace

Category: Gadgetry

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Comments:

Stacey, As I have mentioned to you, we don't support the T3 yet. The crashes are IBM J9 on your T3 using PalmOS 5.2. We don't support the T3 or PalmOS 5.2, and that is explicit on our Web site. We have offered to work with you on trying to get our software working on your platform. Please take us up on it. It is hard to create, but easy to destroy. Please don't rush to judgement until the matter is resolved. Yatin

Posted by Yatin Saraiya on November 10, 2006 at 01:26 AM GMT+00:00 #

We're working on it.

Posted by Neal Gafter on November 10, 2006 at 05:47 AM GMT+00:00 #

Let me reiterate, It's the WebSphere preference dialogue that causes my T3 to reset (crash) and not CalendarPublish. The URL above to WebSphere Everyplace Micro Environment v5.7.1 says that The Tungsten T3 is supported. I've found that if I do not click done after changing a preference it does not crash.

Posted by Stacey Marshall on November 10, 2006 at 09:28 AM GMT+00:00 #

Neal, I'm waiting with bated anticipation. You know who to call should you want a beta tester...

Posted by Stacey Marshall on November 10, 2006 at 09:46 AM GMT+00:00 #

Yatin,

I'm judging only on my requirement: Sync several Google Calendars to assigned categories on my Palm Calendar.

I suggested this via email... I did not receive your offer of support until after I'd written my article.

For CalendarPublish this would mean that you would not have to include the URL in each entries note, as the category denotes where it came from (in combination with the note).

Posted by Stacey Marshall on November 10, 2006 at 10:22 AM GMT+00:00 #

Stacey, The fact that the data is in the Note field doesn't matter for most users, because their only other syncs are with their desktops. If you are also syncing with a public server, then you can always mark your private events private. The software respects that. Yatin

Posted by Yatin Saraiya on November 10, 2006 at 02:49 PM GMT+00:00 #

I do sync to an internal calender server using PilotManager, which is then viewable by others. As you suggest, I could mark my events as private. But what about events that were donwloaded from someone else's private URL? Are you suggesting that after each sync I go through all events setting the private flag on for those that are not mine? Interestingly if they were categorised this would be easier to accomplish.

The reason I want to be able to save each calendar to a different category is that I could then use Datebook 5 to filter by category and assign a different colour or icon. Thus my view would be similar to Goggles view. I could also modify PilotManager to filter out the other categories, and thus not put other peoples events on my Business calendar.

What I'm after is currently not available in any Google-sync product. I appreciate that others may not require this functionality, but its what I'm looking for,.

Posted by Stacey Marshall on November 11, 2006 at 08:33 PM GMT+00:00 #

Stacey, If you sync to someone else's Google Calendar via their private Google url, and they have marked their private events private on their Google Calendar, then these events will automatically be marked private on your handheld if your handheld supports private events. You don't have to do anything like what you are suggesting, unless your handheld's interface does not support private events. The interface, here, for you, is the JSR-75 programming interface on your particular handheld. If your other software then respects the privacy marking on your handheld calendar, then these events will be marked private on whatever you sync to. Our software defaults to private, unless you explicitly mark your handheld events as public, or import events that are explicitly marked public on the Google Calendar that you are importing. This has always been true of our software.

Posted by Yatin Saraiya on November 13, 2006 at 04:41 PM GMT+00:00 #

Yatin, Thank you for the update, I will bear this information in mind. I have continued to use CalendarPublish on my T3 without issue.

Looking at the JSR 75: PDA Optional Packages for the J2METM Platform I see that there is provision for placing events in categories using method addToCategory in the PIMItem Interface. However, it does state that categories are an optional implementation. If it is supported by WebSphere could you please consider my original request for enhancement; to provide a mapping between each Google calendar and a category.

Posted by Stacey Marshall on November 14, 2006 at 10:42 AM GMT+00:00 #

Stacey, We have added a feature that allows you to tag events that are to be written anonymously to the Google Calendar (i.e., the subject in the Google Calendar is BUSY, and every other text field is empty). This may be a start at categories in terms of privacy settings. What we found early on is that the JSR-75 PIM package is supported at different levels on different handhelds, and in fact even the API (which is not fully specified) is implemented differently in different cases. We want to support a certain minimal set of handhelds, and need to be consistent across them. We have your request for category-to-Google-Calendar maps very much in mind, and will support it when it is feasible. Thanks for your input. That's how products improve.

Posted by Yatin Saraiya on November 16, 2006 at 09:43 PM GMT+00:00 #

Via Charles Ditzel blog I noticed the new paper on Java ME Developer Guidelines and Best Practices. May be of interest to some.

Posted by Stacey Marshall on November 16, 2006 at 10:56 PM GMT+00:00 #

Stacey: The solution is easy, and well-known from many other such situations. Make JSR-75 a required standard, and make its API well-defined. That would make everything much easier. The community is largely agreed on this, when they bother with something so "trivial". We have spent many months learning interfaces for specific handhelds, and until there is a standard, we will continue to support our customers. After there is a standard, we will continue to support our customers. All that we will say is that for anyone who works in the field, that blog and that paper say nothing new. By the way, NetBeans crashes all our development machines. There is nothing special about any of our machines. Yatin

Posted by Yatin Saraiya on November 17, 2006 at 12:03 AM GMT+00:00 #

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