You could use the calendar of a messaging software like Outlook or Thunderbird, or install a third party calendar like Desktop Calendar.

The free portable software displays the current date and the days of the current month on the desktop. The display is fully transparent which means that it fits nicely with any desktop background. When you first start the application you will notice that it is positioned in the upper left corner of the screen. You can move the calendar by holding down the shift key, and dragging and dropping the window to another location on the screen. Only the controls at the bottom of the calendar can be used for that.

Right-click the window afterwards and select save position from the menu to lock in it place there. Options in the same menu opens the application preferences. Here you can change the calendar font type, size and colors, spacing, the date format and other relevant preferences. Depending on the desktop background, font and size, you may need to experiment with the available color font colors to find one that is readable.

Edit Reminders is the third and final option available in the context menu. This allows you to set custom reminders, one-time or recurring, for birthdays, appointments and other events. New event types, along with their color code, can be defined in the program options.

The biggest issue that you may have with the program is that you cannot synchronize the data with online calendars or calendars in other applications. The portable nature of the application allows you however to synchronize the data between multiple computer systems.

You can download Desktop Calendar from Glenn Delahoy’s website. The program is fully compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

The calendar can come integrated in a desktop program like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird with the Lightning add-on installed, or as an online calendar like Google Calendar.

Those calendars are usually limited to the Gregorian Calendar, with limited possibilities to display data from other calendars.

That’s where Calendar Magic comes into play. The free software for Windows supports dozens of calendar systems that include religious or cultural calendars.

Full year and individual month Gregorian, Afghan, Armenian, Baha’i, Balinese Pawukon (full year only), Balinese Saka, Bangla, Chinese, Coptic, Egyptian, Ethiopic, French Revolutionary, Hebrew, Hindu Lunisolar (3 variants), Hindu Solar, Indian National, Islamic Arithmetical (8 variants), Javanese Pawukon/Pasaran, Julian, Revised Julian, Parsi Fasli, Parsi Kadmi, Parsi Shenshai, Persian (2 variants), Sikh Nanakshahi and Vietnamese calendars. A user option is provided to choose between displaying/printing calendars showing each week starting on a Monday (in line with the ISO 8601 international standard), on a Sunday for North American users, or on a Saturday for Middle East users.

The option to display those calendars is just one of the many features of the program. It is possible to do a side-by-side comparison of any two of the supported calendar systems, do date conversions or list religious festivals for various world religions.

The application on top of that displays information and offers to make calculations. This includes important events in the world on a specific date, the beginning of the new year in various calendars and information about a user’s birthday.

Maths and other utilities are available to run ovulation calculators and pregnancy calculators, or to write down reminders and notes.

There is a lot this program can do, with some of the tools not being directly or even indirectly related to calendars. This for instance includes the body mass index calculator or a currency converter. If you concentrate purely on the calendar options you’d still come to the conclusion that Calendar Magic offers a lot of functionality.

A full list of features and the program’s download links are available on the developer website. The software is compatible with recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

With the release of Thunderbird 8 came the release of Lightning 1.0. We already mentioned that in the Thunderbird release review we posted yesterday.

Lightning in terms of compatibility has made a step backwards. The calendar only supports Thunderbird 8 and later versions, which can be a serious problem for users who do not just jet want to upgrade to the new version of the desktop email client.

Mozilla has this to say about Lightning:

Lightning 1.0 is the fully integrated calendar Add-on for Thunderbird that lets users organize their schedules and life’s important events as a natural part of their email experience. Lightning gives users the ability to manage multiple calendars, create daily to do lists, invite friends and colleagues to events and meetings, and subscribe to publicly available calendars. With over a million active users, Lightning 1.0 is the calendar solution that users rely on to help them manage their daily lives at work and at home.

When you look at the release notes of Lightning 1.0 you will notice that there are not really that many notable changes to report. Most of the changes are bugfixes that resolve issues of previous Lightning versions. Lightning 1.0 has received some cosmetic changes, most notable new user interface styles for all calendar views.

When you install Lightning in Thunderbird you will notice – after a restart – that it adds a column on the right side of the program. Here you see the current date and calendar week as well as events for today, tomorrow and “soon”. Lightning adds the Events and Tasks menu to the top menubar.

An import option is available supporting iCalendar and Microsoft Outlook comma separated value files. It is furthermore still possible to synchronize Lightning with Google Calendar and other remote calendar locations (via New > Calendar > On the Network).

New Lightning users should take a look at the known issues highlighted on the Lightning 1.0 release notes page.

Are you using a calendar application? If so, which?

The latest Update for the Outlook Connector (version 14.0.6106.5001) is being widely complained about online for constantly causing folder synchronisation errors.  Users of the software are getting the message…

Task ‘-@-.com’ reported error (0×80004005) : ‘Network operation failed’
Task ‘-@-.com’ reported error (0x8004102A) : ‘Error with Send/Receive. There was an error synchronizing your folder hierarchy.The network connection is unavailable or interrupted. Please try again later.’
Task ‘-@-.com’ reported error (0x8004103A) : ‘Synchronization error.’

The official Microsoft Answers support website has a thread about the problem that people are subscribing to in ever greater numbers as the weekend goes on. Many people are reporting that the problem is affecting their calendar, and that there’s no way to fix it.

If you have this problem already then, alas, it looks as if you’ll have to wait for Microsoft to provide a fix.  If you have upgraded your Outlook Connector recently however, rolling back your system using System Restore, might rectify the problem.  For new installations of Outlook however it’s not good news as the system will not allow you to set up a Hotmail or other account unless you are using the very latest version of the connector software.

People who have been hit by this problem have tried everything from completely uninstalling both the Connector and Office, deleting the store folders for both and cleaning out the registry.  They’ve done this though only to find when they reinstall everything the problem still remains.

Microsoft have not yet made any comment about the problem, but ought to be aware of it by now because it’s causing people such significant inconvenience.  Until the problem is resolved my personal recommendation would be to switch temporarily to Windows Live Mail which still syncs with your Hotmail or Gmail account without any problems.

The latest version of the connector was released on the 7th July and should be avoided if you see it in Windows Update.  You should right-click on this update and select “Hide” from the context menu that appears.  With this update hidden Outlook should continue to work for you as normal.  When a replacement update for the connector software is released by Microsoft this should then appear as normal in Windows Update so that you can install it.

It’s not very often that Microsoft release a product update that breaks the product, though as they go this one can be seen in two ways.  Outlook will continue to work, though it will report errors, and if you’re happy to keep your calendar temporarily updated in your web browser then you should be fine.  However, it is very inconvenient for many people and the number joining the complaint thread on the Microsoft support website is growing constantly.  Clearly people are annoyed and these are just the people who know how and where to look for product support online.

There will be a great many more users of the Outlook and Outlook Connector software that will not know where to get help and will currently be thinking there is something wrong with their computer.  This could cost some people money if they ask for an expert to look at it for them.  Clearly then Microsoft need to fix this problem as a matter of priority.

If you are experiencing this problem, the main thread for information on the Microsoft Answers website can be found here.

UPDATED : The problem has now been confirmed to have also affected the x64 version of the latest Outlook Connector update.

In this article I will introduce you to Kontact and help you decide if it is ready to usurp your current tool.

Installation

If you are using KDE 4 you will likely have Kontact installed. To find out go click on Start > Applications > Office and see if it is listed. You might also notice that the constituent parts of Kontact are also listed. That is because you can start each component individually and not have to fire up the who shebang. But let’s assume you do want to fire up the whole kit.

Features

Here’s what Kontact includes:

• Summary page: Shows the summary for everything you have upcoming.
• Mail: Your email client.
• Contacts: Your contacts.
• Calendar: Your personal calendar (integrates with the Akonadi server)
• To-do list: Your tasks.
• Feeds: RSS feeds.
• Journal: A personal journal
• Notebook: A simple note taking tool.
• Popup Notes: A reminder tool in the form of popup notes.
• Time tracker: Keep track of your time.

That’s a lot of features compared to your standard groupware suite. But does it measure up? Just about any user (especially users reading Ghacks) can walk themselves through an application like this and figure out just how to  use it. What I want to do is take a look at the KEY components (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, To-do) and see how it stacks up to the competition. Where does it hit, and where does it miss.

Mail

The biggest miss here is a lack of Exchange support. GNOME’s Evolution already has the ability to connect with multiple versions of Exchange. With Kontact I have found various solutions to this problem (most of which involve a shell script-type solution that no new user would want to try), but nothing built in. The only way you can connect to an Exchange server’s email component in Kontact is if the Exchange server has IMAP support turned on.

On the plus side, Kontact’s email cleint (Kmail) does have very nice integrated Anti-SPAM and Anti-Virus tools, each in the form of a simple wizard. You open this by clicking Tools > Anti-Spam Wizard or Tools > Anti-Virus Wizard.

Calendar

Again, the biggest miss here is the lack of Exchange integration. But I have also found Kontact lacking a simple Google calendar plugin.The problem is, This is not to say that Kontact’s calendar application isn’t worth using. It is. If you are looking for a single-user calendar application that doesn’t need to be easily shared, the Kontact Calendar is outstanding. But the minute you need to share that calendar, or add a Google or Exchange calendar, you will soon find the weaknesses of this tool.

The Calendar tool does have some unique features that might appeal to you. In particular are the Time Spent and Timeline views of the calendar. And , when in the Calendar application, you can choose to add new calendars and the list of possible calendars to add looks impressive. You can add from a Kolab server, OpenXchange server, GroupWise Server, local files, and more. But until Kontact has a simple solution for Exchange and Google, it’s missing out.

To dos

There’s not much you can do wrong with a to-do list. It simply a listing of what you need to do. Like most other to-do lists in groupware suites you can take an email and convert it into a task. And you can convert to do items into calendar items.

Verdict

I was hoping to be able to start using Kontact when KDE 4.5 hit the streets. But truth be told, the lack of integration with critical tools leaves Kontact wanting…seriously wanting. Kontact has a long, long way to go before it is ready for anyone in a business environment. A single user? Sure…Kontact is a great tool for you to use. But the minute you need integration you’re most likely going to have to return to Evolution.

In this article you will see how this calendar is used so you can continue making your decision if Xfce 4 is the desktop for you.

Features

The Orage calendar won’t blow you away with features. But it does have a nice set:

• Runs from notification area.
• Import/Export iCal files.
• Alarms.
• View selected date/week.
• Archiving.
• Popup notification for alerts.
• Daily event listing.

Installation

Orage does not automatically install with Xfce. Instead you have to install it manually by following these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “orage” (no quotes).
3. Mark orage for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. Once installed you can start Orage by clicking Start > Office > Orage. When you start Orage you might be surprised at the size of the main window (see Figure 1).  Figure 1 shows Orage with the Event Window. Even with both panes, in comparison to  the rest of the desktop, the application takes up little screen real estate. And, if that is still too much for you, you can run Orage from the notification area.

Setup

Figure 2

To set up Orage so it will run in the notification area (or system tray…or systray), you have to open up the Preferences window. To do this click Edit > Preferences. In the Preferences window click on the Display tab and make sure Show in systray is checked (see Figure 2).

There are a few other preferences you might want to take a look at. In the Main Setups tab you can set your Archive threshold. What this will do is automatically archive your calendar when it reaches the set threshold. So if you set your threshold for 3 months, every three months you calendar will archive. If it is set to 0 auto archiving is turned off.

Import/export

One of the features that made me decide to cover this tool is the Import/Export feature. Before I get to far with this, there is not auto-publishing feature for Orage. All of this is done manually. But if you are migrating from one calendar to another, it is helpful.

Figure 3

Orage allows you to Import and Export .ics calendars. This means you can import/export to Google calendars (if you use them). It’s very simple to do. Click File > Exchange Data and then (from the Exchange Data window – see Figure 3) you can import and export your .ics files.

Now you may notice the Foreign files tab in the Exchange window.  This is different than the Importing feature. The import feature actually imports your .ics files into your main Orage calendar file. The Foreign files feature allows you, basically, to add new calendars so that Orage is reading multiple files. This way you don’t have to combine calendars. If you think about it, this would also allow you to share out calendars with other users. What you would have to do is have those other users’ calendar files set as Foreign files and add them from a shared directory. You can set these caledars as read-only if you like.

Final thoughts

Orage is a nice little calendar application. It won’t blow you away with it’s features and tricks, but it will work and work well for you. The ability to import/export ics calendars add “external” calendars is quite nice as is its tiny footprint. If you are looking to use Xfce, you will want to take a look at Orage and consider it as your calendaring application.

But there are also standalone programs that provide the desired functionality, UK’s Kalendar is one of them. The free calendar software is offered as a portable version and installer on the developer’s homepage. The name of the application requires a bit of explanation. Kalendar is the German word for the English calendar and UK’s is not referring to the United Kingdom but to the name of the developer of said calendar, Ulrich Krebs.

free calendar software

The program displays the current month one startup. Days are color coded to make it easier to distinguish between work days and weekend. Holiday information are included int he calendar as well. The English calendar displays the US holidays by default which can be switched to (or merged with) Australia, Canada or the UK instead.

calendar holidays

It is furthermore possible to remove holidays from the calendar. There is unfortunately no option to add holidays or specific yearly events to the calendar.

New entries are added to the calendar by double-clicking on a day in the interface. This opens the new event screen where categories, descriptions, notes, display customizations and reminders can be configured.

Start and end days can be configured as well as repetitions in case of reoccurring events. It is for instance possible to configure an event for every first Monday of the month.

Reminders can be configured as popups on the screen and as sound alarms.

calendar reminders

Documents and programs can be attached to events in the action which can be helpful in specific situations.

Many of the internal formats in the calendar software can be changed in the options as well. Here it is for instance possible to change the standard date and time formats, headers, clipboard text format or tooltips.

Additional features offered by UK’s Calendar

• Network support – UK’s Kalender supports a shared event file, where every user can enter events that’ll show up in each other user’s calendar. For using the network functions it is neither required to install special server software nor to keep the computer with the shared event file permanently running. UK’s Kalender will synchronize the local event file as soon as the shared event file is accessible.
• Automatic saving – Any changes to the database are automatically and immediately saved to disk. On every program start, a backup copy of your data file is created.
• Event categories and templates – Events can be organized into categories, e.g. “Doctor”, “Meeting”, “Party” and so on. Each category is assigned a template of settings, including repetition rate and forewarn time.
• ToDo list support
• Export to HTML- and CSV-format – Events and todos can be exported to HTML-format in different views. With this you can easily print your dates and todos. Export to CSV-format allows the transfer of your data to a spreadsheet program. All activated filter options are applied to the output.
• Search and filter functions – You can search for and filter out your events using keywords, categories, event states or date ranges. The filter function directly affects all output functions, so you can easily create e. g. a calendar only containing birthdays.
• Display weekly, fortnight, monthly and yearly calendar views

The free calendar software has two disadvantages that need to be mentioned. The first is that it cannot import calendar data from other applications which means it is not possible to sync it with another calendar software.

The second, not so severe disadvantage is that there is no direct calendar printing option. The workaround is to export the calendar to html and print it in a web browser.

UK’s Kalendar can be downloaded directly from the developer’s homepage. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

In this article I am going to walk you through the section of the eGroupware installation that takes care of the final stages of the eGroupware installation. Once you are done with that, your eGroupware site will be ready to go.

Where are we?

Figure 1

The last thing you did was create the configuration file /var/www/egroupware/header.inc.php. Now it’s a matter of finishing up the installation from a page that is set up in stages (see Figure 1). You will have logged in by now and are ready to take care of the first stage in this final step.

Stage 1: The first stage is to create the database. You have to supply the charset, DB root username, and DB root password. For the charset, just let it as the default. The username/password will be for the username that can connect to the database you created for this setup. Once you have entered that information click Create Database. You should get the warning: Your database is working, but you don’t have any applications installed. When you do get that warning you will also see a button labeled Install all applications. You are now ready to click that button.

Stage 2: When you click the Install all applications button. When this

Figure 2

stage finishes you should see If you did not receive any errors, your applications have been installed. At that point click the Re-check my installation button. Now your setup page should look similar to that in Figure 2. As you can see there are only two stages left in the installation.

Stage 3: As you can see, in the Step 2 Configuration section we have neglected to create a couple of directories. This is simple. Open up a console window and issue the following commands:

• sudo mkdir /opt/egroupware
• sudo mkdir /opt/egroupware/default/
• sudo mkdir /opt/egroupware/default/files
• sudo mkdir /opt/egroupware/default/backup
• sudo chmod -R 777 /opt/egroupware

Now, oddly enough, we need to click on the Edit Current Configuration button and enter the following:

Full path for users and group files: /opt/egroupware/default/files

Full path to the backup directory: /opt/egroupware/default/backup

Click Save and you should be complete. Of course those directories could have been created during the prerequisite stage of the install, but I wanted to highlight how you could go back and re-configure at any stage of the installation. NOTE: If there are any other issues in your Current Configuration, now is the time to take care of them.

Stage 4: The final step is to click on the Create an Admin Account button. When you click on that you only need fill out the information for the admin account. All of the information is straight forward. You will notice two check boxes. One is to allow the admin access to all installed applications. Although they warn you this can be annoying, I tend to prefer it this way so my admin user can see everything. You can also opt to have eGroupware create demo accounts. This is users choice. You will be creating accounts anyway – so this is up to you.

That should do it. When you click Save on this you should have all green checks and be ready to log into your eGroupware installation. You will find a TON of stuff to configure now. Start playing around and see what eGroupware has to offer.

The Google Calendar features can easily be activated in the labs section and Google just announced the addition of three new Calendar Labs applications that users can activate in their account.

Event Flair is the first Google Calendar Labs app. It can be used to add specific icons to individual Calendar events, like a cake for a birthday or a plane for traveling. Users who are invited to the events do see the icons as well.

The second addition, Gentle Reminders, is currently only available if the Google Chrome web browser is used as the Internet browser. It changes the way event reminders are shown to the user. Instead of browser alerts, which can interrupt the users workflow tab and title reminders are shown. They will start blinking.

It is furthermore possible to configure the reminders as floating desktop notifications instead. An option that can be configured in the extension’s settings.

The third and final Calendar lab application is Automatically Declining Events which can be used to define periods in time when all event invitations will automatically be declined. This can be very useful during holidays or work related travels so that other users are informed immediately about a person’s absence.

Google Calendar users find the new features in their Calendar application.

There has not however been a way to integrate other Google services that are related to Gmail into Thunderbird. The Google Calendar Tab add-on for Thunderbird 3 changes this. It basically only displays the web interface of Google Calendar in a new tab in Thunderbird.

And since the extension uses the same account all information from that Google Calendar account are already available in Thunderbird. It is possible to view, edit and add events to Google Calendar which are then also visible on the Google Calendar website. If the calendar has been configured to show popups then they will be shown in Thunderbird as well.

The extension for the email client supports both Google Calendar and Calendar for Google Apps. Google Calendar Tab is an interesting add-on for Thunderbird that aids Google Calendar users who work with Thunderbird to integrate their calendar into the email client. There are other options to do that. IIRC it is possible to integrate Google Calendar into Lightning as well.

• Seamless integration into the new Thunderbird 3.0 user interface
• The different modes (calendar view, task view) are now diplayed in tabs
• Lightning now supports SeaMonkey 2.0 as a host application
• You can now define multiple alarms for a single event
• CalDAV support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers have been improved
• The application stability, performance and memory consumption have been improved
• A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website (LINK MISSING)

It should also be noted that Lightning 1.0 beta 1 does not support Mozilla Thunderbird 2.x anymore. Users who have not switched to the new version of the email client will have to keep using Lightning 0.9x instead. It is also a good idea to check the known issues before starting the installation to avoid incompatibilities and other problems.

Mozilla Lightning 1.0 beta 1 can be downloaded from the project’s homepage at the Mozilla website.

OSMO is not an organizer that will do everything for you. I will not sync with your iPhone or your Blackberry. OSMO will not publish your calendar or allow you to drag and drop from one application to another. What OSMO will do is keep track of your calendar, tasks, contacts, and notes. In this article you will learn how to install OSMO and see just what it has to offer.

NOTE: As of this writing, the OSMO website is not responding.

Features

The OSMO PIM offers the following features:

• Calendar
• Tasks
• Contacts
• Notes
• Alarms
• Printing
• Date calculator
• Day notes
• Timeline
• iCal support
• Notification alarms
• GNOME system tray support

And more.

Installing OSMO

Even though the OSMO web site has gone MIA, the application can be found in your distributions’ repositories. So in order to install OSMO you only need follow these simple instructions:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “osmo” (no quotes).
3. Mark the results for installation.
4. Click Apply.
5. Sit back and enjoy the progress bar.

Figure 1

Once OSMO is installed you will find the executable menu entry in the Office sub-menu of the Applications menu. Click that entry and the OSMO main window will open (see Figure 1).

With OSMO, what you see is what you get. This is the only window you will need. From here you do everything. And the very first thing you will want to do is to make sure that OSMO runs in the background so, in order to recall your PIM, you only have to click on the OSMO icon in the system tray (the man in the suit with the black hair).

You can find this configuration option in the Options tab. At the bottom of this tab you will see two options:

• Enable System Tray
• Start Minimized

These should both be self explanitory.

Other options (in the General tab) you might want to take care of in the Options tab are:

• Date format
• Time format
• Web browser
• E-mail client

Now there are also sub-tabs for Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Notes. Poke around each sub-tab and configure these features to your liking. One configuration that might give you pause is the  “command” options. In the Tasks options you will see an option “Global notification command”. What you can do here is set a command for a task notification. You can get creative here, like using a sound with the “play” command. Whatever you use here, make sure it can be executed from within a terminal window. You could do something like this:

(xmessage -near An OSMO task awaits your attention) &

The above would pop up a small window with the message “An OSMO task awaits your attention” when the reminder hits.

That’s it for the more important options. Now let’s take a look at the heart of OSMO.

Calendar

Figure 2

The OSMO calendar (see Figure 1) offers all the standard features you would expect in a PIM calendar. In order to add a task you only have to right click a date and select Add Task. The creation of a task is very straight forward. Also from this right click menu you can browse Notes, iCal Events, and export to iCal.

As you can see, when you view a particular day in the OSMO calendar it will give you the details of that day as well as showing the days tasks. What I like about this is that it is one of the most uncluttered views of all the PIMs I have tried. You quickly get an idea of what your day is like.

Another nice feature is that when you add a task to your calendar it is automatically created as a task. But what if you just want to add a meeting or office hours? You certainly don’t want all of your appointments to show up as tasks. No. To add non-task entries in your calendar you want to toggle the Day Note panel (Upper right icon in the icon toolbar) and then insert a time line by clicking the small clock icon in the Notes pane (see Figure 3).

Figure 4

When you add a timeline in the Notes you will see the notes pane go from an empty window to a window with a timeline broken into the interval you configure (when you click the Add timeline button).

Now you can add meetings in a more standard way, and without adding them as tasks.

Final thoughts

Although OSMO won’t make the balancing act between work and home a simple, automated task, it will allow you to keep yourself organized in a clean, user-friendly way. And you don’t have to worry about losing calendars on a server, getting bogged down in cumbersome UIs, or lost in feature-bloat.

OSMO is a simple, easy-to-use PIM that will keep you simply organized.

Google yesterday announced that they have added a new feature to Google Calendar which they call Interesting Calendars. Currently three different types of these calendars are available, namely holidays, sport schedules and misc. Holiday calendars make it easier than ever to add holidays of a specific country automatically to the Google Calendar. Available are a few dozen countries including the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain or India. This category includes Christian and Islamic holidays as well.

The sport schedules calendars offer a variety of popular sports that can be added to Google Calendar. Available are baseball, basketball, football (that’s American Football), Hockey, Rugby and Soccer. A click on any of these sports will open a larger list with leagues that are supported by Google Calendar. Soccer for instance contains all major European and South American leagues plus competitions like the European Champions League or the World Cup.

A click on any league will display the sport teams that are part of that league. It is then possible to subscribe to one or multiple teams. The team schedules are then added to Google Calendar. The misc section lastly contains three different options. The first is to add contact birthdays automatically to Google Calendar while the other two add moon phases and star dates to it. Check out Google Calendar to explore the new options for yourself.

What I like most about gdeskcal is that it can always reside on your desktop, taking up very little resources, and staying out your way until you need it. Gdesktop doesn’t hover over your application windows or demand your attention unless it is giving you a reminder about an appointment. And gdeskcal is easy to install and configure. So let’s take a look at gdeskcal.

Installing

Most likely you will find gdeskcal in your distribution’s repositories. If you’re using Fedora, and you can not find them in your repos, you can always download the rpm file from pbone.net and install the gdeskcall associated with your release. You can also find the gdeskcal-skins package from pbone.net as well. The gdeskcal-skins package will be necessary if you want to use different themes.

To install gdesktop using your Add/Remove Software utility follow these steps:

1. Open up the utility from the Applications menu
2. Do a search for gdeskcal
3. Select both gdeskcal and gdeskcal-skins (the latter may not show up in your repos)
4. Click Apply to install

If you’re not a fan of the gui tools you can always run the command line installation like so:

sudo apt-get install gdeskcal

which will do the installation for you.

Running gdeskcal

Figure 1

You will find a menu entry for gdeskcal in the GNOME Accessories submenu of the Applications menu. When you click on the gdeskcal will open, revealing an elegant, simple calendar desktop applet (see Figure 1).

When gdeskcal opens you will be treated to the default theme. Most of the themes are transparent in nature so, depending upon your background, you might have to change themes so gdeskcal is easily viewable.

Changing your theme is quite simple. If you right click the gdeskcal applet a menu will appear with an entry “Change Skin”. When you select that entry a new window will open where you can select a skin. Now if you had to install gdeskcal via rpm you most likely will notice a lack of different skins to choose from. Even if you installed the gdeskcal-skins rpm file you still may not see any. The reason for this is that, for some odd reason, the gdeskcal-skins rpm installs the skins in the wrong directory. The default directory for gdeskcal skins is /usr/lib/gdeskcal/skins but the rpm installs them into /usr/share/gdeskcal/skins. In order for gdeskcal to see these skins open up a terminal window, su to root, and issue the command:

mv /usr/share/gdeskcal/skins/* /usr/lib/gdeskcal/skins/

Now all of the skins will appear in the gdeskcal skins window.

Adding an event

Upon first glance you will not see any obvious means to enter an event. Don’t worry, it’s a simple task.

Enter an event

Figure 2

Double click on a date and a new window will open. This new window is where you add events. As is you can not do anything in this window until you click the “New” button. Click that button and the window widow will change so that you can enter the details of the event (see Figure 2).

It should be obvious what you need to enter for an event. After you enter a date you won’t see anything change on the applet. If you hover your mouse over a date, however, a small popup will appear showing you the details of the event.

Final thoughts

Gdeskcal is one of those applications that you will come to rely on – especially if you are en Evolution user. It is a seamless application that takes up little space and little resources.

To enable this feature you will need Google Gears, which will download some stuff for you, then off you go, you can view your calendar offline. Sadly you can only view your calendar at the moment, you won’t be able to edit or add events. I imagine they will be adding this soon, I would think this only requires some simple syncing.

Until then, you have full viewing access to your calendar, and you can use Google Gears with many sites, like Remember The Milk, Google Reader, Zoho Writer, and more. Do you know any other cool sites that work with Google Gears? Let us know, perhaps in the future we can download the whole internet and use it at home!

Every add-on that is added to Mozilla is an experimental add-on at the beginning which basically means that only registered users may download and install the add-on. It is no indication of the quality of an add-on which is important to note.

Google Calendar will be displayed in an overlay that resembles a popup only that it is only visible in the tab where the button was pressed. The website below is shown at the edges and a click on that part will close Google Calendar again and display the website fully. A second click on the status bar button has the same effect.

All buttons and functions of Google Calendar can be accessed in the overlay as if it would have been opened in its own tab. That’s a great and convenient way to check the calendar or add a new entry to it. The overlay is still available even if the user switches tabs. The links to other Google services will load in a new tab but everything that is related to the Calendar will open just fine in the overlay.

Update: The add-on has been pulled from the Mozilla add-on repository. There is no comparable add-on available. The closest are the Google Calendar Notifier add-on and GoogCal.

The manual way would be to export the Calendar files from Microsoft Outlook as comma separated values (csv) and import them into Mozilla Lightning. To do that open Microsoft Outlook and select File > Import and Export from the top menu.

The Import and Export Wizard will show up offering choices to import data into Microsoft Outlook and export data into files as well. Pick the Export To A File entry from the selection.

The Export To A File menu shows up which offers to export data into various file types. Select the Comma Separated Values (Windows) entry from the available choices.

After making that selection it is time to select the data that should be exported. Pick the Calendar entry from the available data sources.

Select a file name for the calendar export, pick the data range that you want to export and save it to the computer’s hard drive. Now that the exported data is available it is time to import it into Mozilla Lightning.

Make sure that the Mozilla Lightning extension for the email client Thunderbird has already been installed. Start Mozilla Thunderbird afterwards and click on the Calendar button in the lower left corner of the application’s window. It is possible to use the shortcut [CTRL 3] to go to the calendar as well.

Lightning supports Calendar imports from csv and ics files. Pick the csv filter in the file browser and navigate to the hard drive folder that contains the Microsoft Outlook Calendar export. A click on that file will load the calendar in Mozilla Lightning and make the calendar available there.

The Open Source tool Outpost provides an elegant alternative. It has not been updated in the last years but is still able to export Outlook data. It can be used to export Outlook Calendar data in an ics file which can then be imported into Mozilla Lightning or any other application that supports the format.

Windows Live Mesh

If you managed to get into the Mesh Technical Preview a few months ago then you would have seen the possibilities of Live Mesh, a very impressive release from Microsoft.

Since then there have been 3 updates including the latest. Bugs have been fixed, its no longer necessary to have UAC activated to use Mesh, File sharing across networks was added and now Mesh is open for any US user, and any one else if they change their localisation language settings to English (US). Very basic support for mobile devices has also been incorporated and although isn’t too functional at the moment it looks very promising.

You can see all your directories, files and even upload photos you’ve taken from your mobile into your mesh. This is actually a great feature, because if you can have photos stored in the cloud then space on your phone is saved, although it all depends on the cost of data transfer from your phone.

You no longer have to go though Microsoft Connect to get a mesh account either, a welcome change.

Windows Live Calendar

A minor update to Windows Live Calendar has introduced some ‘catch up’ features and enhancements but nothing too useful like synchronisation between Windows Calendar and Live Calendar. According to Liveside.net the update includes:

• Firefox 3 support
• Subscribing to public calendars
• Automatic birthday calendar for contacts
• Working link between Hotmail and Live Calendar
• Printing in day/week/month view
• More language support

As some of the more regular readers may know, I’m all into the whole ‘portable’ thing, and am constantly looking for ways to use stealthy software, sync my data or access it wherever I go. So it’s not surprising I stumbled across the SyncKolab Thunderbird extension some time ago looking for a possibility to sync my contacts across different computers as easy as my bookmarks using Foxmarks. Didn’t turn out that time, I just couldn’t get it to work.

But now, you may have guessed it already where this is heading, version 1.0 is out and, what can I say, it works like a charm, and not only for my contacts, but for my lightning-powered to-do’s and calendar items as well!

The whole thing uses the Kolab ‘protocol’ (in lack for a better word), which uses iCals and E-Mails containing xml-files to, among other things, store the items in your IMAP-Folder.

There’s a pretty good tutorial how to set it up as well, but it’s principle is rather simple. Choose an IMAP-Account, the items you want to have synced (contacts, calendar and to-do; the latter two require lightning to be installed) and where to store the data in the IMAP folder structure. I used a new folder named Synckolab containing subfolders for each of the groups, though I don’t know if it’s necessary to split them up.

Conflicts are resolved by using a pre-defined setting (always use server-side or client-side), or by asking the user, which is always my personal weapon of choice.

The whole thing also works with a specialized server component as well as different clients such as KDE’s Kontact for instance. Check out the wikipedia-entry if you’re interested.

The creators recently published a demonstration video that is showing some of the functions that are currently implemented in Spicebird. The application itself looks pretty stable considering that the next public release will be 0.3 alpha. This release version includes an RSS reader as well. What is missing, or has not been shown in the video is the Wiki which would add tremendous value to the software.

Spicebird is based on Mozilla and uses several modules like Thunderbird and Lightning. A customizable homepage is the starting point whenever you run Spicebird. You can add all sorts of widgets, modules and the likes to it just like you would do on websites like Netvibes.

It is possible to add upcoming events, Rss feeds or a mail folder to get a quick overview. I think this is wonderful but they have to think of a solution where someone would want to add lots of RSS feeds to the application. I’m not sure how Spicebird would handle this.

They did add at least one unique feature to the mail client. Mails are automatically scanned for events and if one is found Spicebird will ask if you want to add the event to your calendar. the Instant Messenger is based on Jabber and integrates perfectly into Spicebird.

You do see the online status of your contacts in your address book / contacts list and can send them a message instantly that way.

I hope they do provide easy ways of importing data from Thunderbird, Mozilla and RSS readers into the application which would probably help in gaining users.

via [Cybernetnews]