Synced Agenda
So I dropped using Mozilla Sunbird as my calendaring application. It has some great features (iCal support, WebDAV syncing, email/sms notifications, etc) but it was just too unstable. I had gotten used to the instability in the program since I had been using it since the 0.1x versions, started making own backups and whatever, but the last straw? The removal of features for “ease of use” and the stability just kept getting worse as the versions went up, isn’t that an oxymoron?
So I wanted to switch to a calendaring application that could import an iCal calendar (most do nowadays, thanks to Apple and Mozilla using such an open standard). I also required synchronization, so that I could access the same information from my laptop (or from any PC in the world if possible). I finally ended up just going for a web-based calendar solution, just because the desktop applications were either too big/bloated or just didn’t have what I required. My final two choices? The built-in calendar in my webmail solution, Horde, or the Google Calendar*.
Horde’s calendar was pretty good, had everything I wanted plus it was mature enough in it’s release for everyday use. Since I also use it’s webmail features occasionally (when not using Mozilla Thunderbird on my laptop and desktop) this would have been perfect. Alas, it got beat by Google’s Calendar.
Google’s Calendar, very impressive, I love the way that it uses Ajax like many of Google’s online services, it just feels like I’m using an application instead of browsing a web page, plus it just feels a lot faster and smoother, not to mention it looks better than Horde’s solution. Plus it has public calendars that I can subscribe to for Holidays and such, they’re all color-coded differently and can be enabled/disabled on the fly. Plus reminders and ability to import/export to almost anything (RSS even).
I’ve been using Google’s Calendar for a while now and have absolutely no regrets, plus today I just started using GCalSync. It’s a free app for your cell phone that syncs your phone’s built-in calendar feature with whatever you have on your Google Calendar. It’s pretty handy for those times when you need to know what time the appointment was or when exactly you have a meeting.
*I looooooove Firefox 2. I was typing out this post and I accidentally closed the tab that contained the write page, BAM, everything I typed lost…Firefox 2 to the rescue! I clicked on the menu, selected “Undo Close Tab” and everything came back up perfectly sexily, even all the junk I had typed in the text box, now that’s impressive. Not to mention the amazing built-in spell checker that shows red lines under misspelled words you type (like Microsoft Word).
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