ical, sunbird, other calendaring clients?

boy, reading all these issues with iCal has me a bit concerned that it needs more work... i've used iCal only a little over the years. but i'm now starting to try it out for my work and home environments. i have a gmail account and am just now testing GCALDaemon software to sync iCal to google. but i'm reading that with 10.5 and ical 3, that many things have broken in that connection. i'll be upgrading sometime soon to 10.5. i wonder if i shouldn't be trying out other calendaring software... i just downloaded sunbird (mozilla)... it looks like it just read in whatever i had in ical... so i wonder if that will be a more stable option?

for this network calendaring, i hope someday it gets to be as well developed and planned out as the email client server models. with the open standards, anyone can use just about any email client with just about any email server... but i think calendaring has quite a ways to go before it get that modular and interchangeable... from everything i'm reading, apple's has made good progress in this type of standardization, since it seems like the ical file format appears to be one of the basic standards (.ics)... but i do worry that the microsoft outrage/exchange juggernaut has the potential to derail such standards since they appear to be making many inroads in the corporate world...

i recognized apple is working very hard on many fronts. so i hope they can pull it all together...

from a personal desire, i want to be able to sync across whatever servers i'm using, like google calendar. and i'd like multiple calendars, so i can separate my home life from my work life. i also want the notification to use standard email so i can invite someone and they don't need my calendar program to see the invitation. i think ical and sunbird both do most of these things, except that they need extra software for gcal syncing... unfortunately, for my work environment, i'd like the "it" people to have a server i can sync to with these clients. but they seem to be leaping from one proprietary software to another. so i'm ruling that out as a possibility...

does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations about ical vs sunbird vs other clients?
i'd appreciate hearing about it...

thanks-

PBG4 1.5GHz, PBG4 500MHz, iPod 40Gig, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Apr 15, 2008 5:31 PM

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1 reply

Apr 17, 2008 1:49 PM in response to Jeffery Nunes

i spent a little time testing Chandler calendaring client ( http://chandlerproject.org/) and i'm quite impressed with their program. it is still a beta, but it does seem to connect to google and the feature set seems quite good. it has a "triage" mode for calendaring and tasks using the same organization as "Omnifocus" (using the "Getting things done" organization) that seems very practical for the user... from what i can tell, this uses the same calendaring communications protocols (ical), so it might even work with apples iCal server (but i don't have access to an iCal server, so i don't have any way to test it...)... the chandler server is one of the open source/open standards calendaring servers, which i think the desktop iCal program will work with... they are a ways before a released product. so it is not ready for prime time, but it is very promising... i just don't want to find myself with outrage (outlook) forced upon me in work environments because there aren't other good multi-platform option, like there are for email clients/servers...

i'll probably use iCal for now since it is a shipping product. but some of the extra features of chandler seem very well thought out and make it more than just a calendaring program... so i'll probably try it more when they get nearer to a release version...

if anyone has more info on these calendaring program, i'd still like to hear about it, since i've only tried them out a little in the last few days...

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ical, sunbird, other calendaring clients?

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