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.

Related posts

• Organize your life with Total Organizer (1)
• Kontact: The Swiss Army Knife of PIMs (3)
• Use SyncKolab to synchronize your Thunderbird Data (4)
• Spicebird introduction (3)
• Several Updates to Windows Live (2)

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.

Related posts

• Redesign your Google Calendar with a custom skin (1)
• Google Redesigned (0)
• Display Google Calendar in the Sidebar (2)
• Connect Evolution to Google mail and calendar (1)
• Access Google Calendar Without Leaving The Page (13)

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.

Related posts

• Use SyncKolab to synchronize your Thunderbird Data (4)
• Use Bogofilter for better junk detection in Evolution (3)
• Spicebird introduction (3)
• Several Updates to Windows Live (2)
• Replace Outlook with Evolution: A Linux Groupware Suite (17)

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!

Related posts

• Use SyncKolab to synchronize your Thunderbird Data (4)
• Spicebird introduction (3)
• Several Updates to Windows Live (2)
• OSMO: Your friendly personal organizer (2)
• Offline Gmail Buzz (12)

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.

Related posts

• Google Redesigned (0)
• Page Bookmarks (2)
• Open Random Website In Firefox (4)
• Mozilla Prism 1.0 Beta (8)
• gReactions Adds Comments To Google Reader (5)

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.

Related posts

• Microsoft Outlook Quickbooks Addin (2)
• Microsoft Outlook Mail Time Zone Plugin (7)
• Microsoft Outlook Macro To Save Images In Emails (0)
• Microsoft Outlook Facebook Add-On (1)
• Microsoft Outlook Express Email Extraction (0)

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

Related posts

• Windows Live and Internet Explorer. What’s the Story? (3)
• Zoom It (4)
• XP SP3 and Vista SP 1 available through Windows Update (6)
• XP Keep Per User Display Settings (1)
• Word Document Property Tool (0)

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.

Related posts

• Add a Calendar to Thunderbird (3)
• Synchronize Contacts Between Thunderbird And Gmail (12)
• Importing Calendar From Microsoft Outlook To Mozilla Lightning (5)
• Why I’m Still Using A Software Email Client (17)
• Use Gmail As Email Backup Space (2)

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]

Related posts

• Process NZBs And Torrents In Gmail Automatically (1)
• Postbox Beta 14, Announces Pricing (19)
• Outlook Duplicate Items Remover (4)
• Microsoft Outlook: Display And Save Email Attachments (1)
• Microsoft Outlook Mail Statistics (0)

What you need to do is add the mobile version of Google Calendar to your bookmarks, right-click the bookmark, select properties from the menu and check the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” option.

Whenever you load the bookmark from then on it will be displayed in the sidebar displaying the current and upcoming events. This is great if you look at your entries frequently.

Read More:

Google Calendar Mobile
via Firefox Facts

Related posts

• Access Google Calendar Without Leaving The Page (13)
• YesScript is NoScript’s Antagonist (8)
• Webslices and Activities ported to Firefox (5)
• Web Browser: Firefox Save Tabs Add-On (1)
• Warning Unresponsive Script in Firefox (14)

The extension adds itself seamlessly into Thunderbird. The calendar uses the space beneath your inbox to display the current month and the latest upcoming events.

Clicking on a day loads the monthly view window displaying every day of the month and all the events that you already added to that month.

Right-clicking a day and selecting new event lets you add events to your calendar which can import and export the data into different clients. This is of course pretty useful if you have to use a different calendar at work or another workplace.

We have to use Outlook at work and I never thought of using Outlook at home as well. Lightning lets me use Thunderbird at home and sync the data of my works Outlook calendar easily.

Next to the monthly view window you can of course change to weekly or daily view to view a detailed view of those events.

Lightning for Thunderbird is a great extension that adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird. I would recommend it to everyone who missed that feature in Thunderbird.

Related posts

• Use SyncKolab to synchronize your Thunderbird Data (4)
• Thunderplunger: Keep Thunderbird Clean (1)
• Thunderbird Security Update To 2.0.0.17 (0)
• Thunderbird Mailbox Alert (0)
• Thunderbird Birthday Reminder (0)

You are able to set alarms for events and synchronise the calendar between different clients. It supports iCal and Outlook appointments, offers hotkeys and several additional skins.

Related posts

• Zip Repair (3)
• Zen Key An All Purpose Application Manager (3)
• Youtube Batch Downloader (13)
• Yahoo Widget Position Restorer (1)
• Workrave (6)