pmsumner

I've been wrestling this evening with Thunderbird, Lightening, Google Calendar and GCalDaemon.

I say wrestling, frankly it's all been remarkably simple! Once I figured out what GCalDaemon actually does, anyhow. It's a nice bit of software from what I can see. It sits on your PC and acts as a proxy server for data from your PC to Google Calendars/GMail. At it's most basic, it lets you synchronise Mozilla's Sunbird/Thunderbird app with your Google Calendar - 2 way syncs unlike Windows Calendar's 1-way, read only sync. I'm rapidly becoming a bigger fan of Google's products than ever before. let me list the reasons why:

1: GMail now has IMAP access! This is a BIG thing. No longer do you need web access to effectively utilise GMail on the move. You can update your mailbox on your mobile device, your PC's mail client at home, your PC's mail client at work and all will be synced with the GMail account. For someone who uses a mobile device it's really useful. Never mind that GMail is possibly the root of all evil. If I had a spare PC at home any more I'd set up 'pmsumner.eu.org' with web, mail, DNS, IMAP and SSH again. Gives a nifty centrally self-controlled point but also requires maintenance and setup...

2: Google Calendar. It's useful to be able to sync my mobile device, my PC at work and my PC at home (which doesn't have Outlook on it) with a single Calendar. This would be easy if I had Outlook at home but I don't. As such it's necessary to sync everything with Google Calendar, which then syncs with my PC at home and my mobile device, which syncs with the work PC. It's a bit convoluted but it works. If there was an open, interoperable standard for syncing apps then this could be resolved easily..... See above points about evilness, but no spare PC to set up a Web/Group/Cal DAV server.

 -----------                  ----------
| Work PC   |    ActiveSync  | Mobile   |
| (Outlook) |<-------------->|   Device |
 -----------                  ----------
                                  ˄
                                  | GooSync
                                  ˅
 ---------------              -----------
| Home PC       | GCalDaemon | Google    |
| (Thunderbird) |<---------->|  Calendar |
 ---------------              -----------

3: Google Reader. A single interface for reading my RSS feeds wherever I go. Can be used on a mobile device easily, interesting articles are easily marked and no need to maintain seperate lists of RSS feeds on seperate PCs.

So no doubt in a week or two I'll be swearing about how crap GCalDaemon is :)