So, I’m kinda tired of trying to find a solution to this. What I want is a non-commercial, freely available application (NOT service) that will sync bidirectionally between Google Calendar and Apple iCal, Evolution, and whatever Mozilla calls its calendar today (Sunbird?).
I’ve used Spanning Sync, which worked well enough, but I never liked that my data traversed their servers. Then, they decided to charge me for the privilege of sending my data through their servers, which I didn’t want to do in the first place.
Then I looked at gsync, but I decided not to bother with it because they have commercial aspirations as well, and while they say it’ll only be $20, and it’s a standalone application, I don’t really want to get all set up with it and be let down when they decide it’s worth much more or something.
So I downloaded gcaldaemon, which is an open source, freely available, standalone application, but after about a day of fiddling with it, I couldn’t get it to do much of anything that was useful. What’s more, it’s written in java, so I’m not going to go mucking about with the source code (I don’t code java).
I’ve decided to figure out a solution on my own, as a pet project to help me get used to programming in Python and using the various Google APIs. I just started last night, and I’ve gotten as far as logging in and getting a list of my calendars. I have an extremely long way to go, but between this project and another one I’m doing at work, I should become pretty adept at using Python, and it’s been great fun!
It should be noted that there’s already a Python library for the Google Calendar API. I downloaded it, and I’m using some of that code as example code to get me going, but I’m not using that library as of right now, because I’m more interested in learning than I am in getting a working product immediately. Maybe I’ll do something useful and will be able to contribute code back to that project. Maybe after some time of mucking with this I’ll see the light and decide to use the API. Either way, whatever code I produce will be available to whoever wants it in some form.
Technorati Tags: productivity, python, development, google-calendar, spanning-sync, gsync, gcaldaemon, technology, gdata, opensource, ical, mozilla
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