I was somewhat disappointed that there is no easy way to sync a Palm device with Apple iCal or Mozilla Calendar. I was even tempted to make a crack at writing a Palm conduit to sync w/ iCalendar files (it would in fact be a worthwhile project to persue). Regardless of the fact that a Palm conduit written in C/C++ on the Windows platform is well above my capability, it is a bit too drastic to get your users to install an odd piece of software on their computers just to use a diving calendar. It just ain’t going to happen.
While working on another project, I was re-reading Philip Greenspun’s excellent Web Publishing book, specifically Chapter 15, case 3, where he commented:-
Sure there are plenty of fancy calendar management systems that incorporate one-time events, recurring events, and reminders. But most of these calendar management programs require you to maintain them on a Macintosh or Windows machine. If you switch from computer to computer then they don’t do you much good. We all read our e-mail no matter where we are, so why not build a system that feeds reminders into our e-mailbox?
So my calendar project will send out email and SMS reminders. Apple iCal and Mozilla Calendar users can have it easy because these programs can pick up changes in a published calendar. The Palm and PocketPC users can deal with any updates manually. I don’t know of anyone who lives by their Palm or PocketPC datebook. For that matter I don’t know of anybody who lives by Apple iCal or Mozilla Calendar. Email plus SMS reminders would be good enough for all.