A few years ago, I bought a Mac, and immediately fell in love. It was the UNIX desktop machine I'd always wanted. I've been playing around with the default utilities, and I've noticed a few shortcomings. When I've noticed shortcomings on Linux, I've just literally programmed my way out of it. Most Linux utilities are good about exposing CLI interfaces you can use to script new functionality, or use it to interface with other utilities. One thing I've noticed is the Calendar, which I love, will only sync to .Mac, or Google Calendar, if you pay $25.
You can "Publish" a Private Calendar, or "Subscribe" to a Remote Calendar. But Remote Calendars are read only. After reading around on all the apple sites, I could not find a way (for free, I'm super cheap after all) to get the functionality I wanted. So I've fired up Xcode, and looked up the Documentation for Sync Services, and am all set to learn Objective C.
It's painful.
UPDATE: Fuck it. I just started to use sunbird, which does exactly what I want, and doesn't make me do a whole bunch of hacking to get it to work. I basically have this setup now.
Create a Remote Calendar with Sunbird.
Use Sunbird as your main calendar utility, as it reads and writes to the remote calendar directly.
For Ipod and/or Iphone (If canadian telcos ever get their act together and offer the damn things) syncing, I just subscribe to the remote calendar that I created and edit with sunbird.
You know, it kinda pisses me off that I can't use iCal the way I want to, and have it just work.
Published
17 December 2007