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Seeking Nerdvana The Road from Windows - Time for change
Seeking Nerdvana The Road from Windows - Time for change | The Road from Windows - Time for change |
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| by Adam Turner | |
| Tuesday, 04 December 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2
Having switched from Outlook to Thunderbird for email, it makes sense to consider Thunderbird's Lightning plugin for my calendar.Lightning looks like it should meet my needs, but while I'm in Mac-land I thought I should take a look at iCal. Very slick and with a very similar look to Google's online calendar. One advantage of iCal is it lets you click on a pop-up reminder to open and edit the appointment, something Lightning doesn't do. One of my pet hates about Outlook 2003's calendar is that the alerts steal the focus, so you can accidentally press okay when a reminder pops up in front of what you're doing. iCal and Lightning reminders pop-up in front of what you're doing but they don't steal the focus so you can't dismiss them by accident. Maybe this is a Mac thing, I'm not sure. Anyway, to put Lightning and iCal to the test I really needed to import my own data, but getting my calendar out of Outlook 2003 proved to be a little tricky. As usual, Microsoft offers plenty of options for importing data from other applications but not many for those who want to leave Outlook. At a minimum you lose some of the advanced settings. Exporting my calendar as CSV Windows file and importing it into Lightning on XP was a complete mess with appointments scattered randomly and some yearly events now occurring every day. Sadly Lightning on the Mac refused to even read the CSV Windows file. iCal only imports from iCal, vCal and Entourage. I found some scripts online for exporting Outlook to iCal but they looked like a lot of messing around so I decided to try some other things first. I thought it might be easier to import my Outlook calendar into Google Calendar first and then export it into the other apps. One of the downsides of leaving Outlook is the need to find a new way to sync my calendar with my Windows Mobile 5 phone. If I can use a desktop calendar that syncs with Google Calendar then maybe I could access the Google Calendar from my phone and eliminate the need to sync my phone with my desktop (which to be honest I rarely do at the moment). Unfortunately I can't see the mobile Google Calendar in IE on my phone. I believe Opera Mobile might do the trick, but I haven't tested it yet. Syncing should become a thing of the past as more apps move online and mobile internet access improves. First I tried OggSync to upload from Outlook to Google Calendar, which seemed to work fine but the trial version only uploads a few days worth of appointments. Considering I'm trying to abandon Outlook, there seemed little point in buying the full version. Google Calendar says it will import data as CSV DOS but when I tried to export DOS from Outlook it demanded the original disc so it could install new features. It's so annoying when MS Office apps do that! It was the middle of the night and I couldn't be bothered finding the disc, so I tried importing CSV Windows into Google Calendar instead. Google Calendar complained about the import not working a few times, even though it appeared to, but on the third go it said I'd successfully imported 2381 of 2382 events. I've got no idea what the one missing event is but I'm hoping it's in the past. From here it was pretty easy to export from Google Calendar as an .ics file and then import it into iCal using this simple guide. Now I had to get my calendar from iCal to Lightning. Easy. Lightning will import .ics files, just like iCal, so I just imported the same .ics file that I'd exported from Google Calendar. Both iCal and Lightning will also export in .ics, so I can easily switch between them. It's amazing how applications happily play together once you escape Microsoft world. The trick now is syncing them with Google Calendar. I haven't tried this yet, but there seems to be plenty of options of iCal and the Provider for Google Calendar plugin looks like it will do the job for Thunderbird & Lightning. Since I'm strongly considering buying a Mac Book rather than moving to Ubuntu, I'm leaning towards using iCal rather than Lightning. I'm trying to resist the temptation to move Apple apps, as the point is to stay as platform agnostic as possible, but I know I can easily shift data between applications using the .ics format. I'll keep looking at new versions of Lightning and will consider switching to it when it meets my needs. The long term goal is to wean myself off desktop software completely, so I'll keep an eye on Google's online offering and the features in Google Notifier. Now I'm finally free of Microsoft on the desktop, I've got the freedom to do what suits me rather than what suits Redmond. PREVIOUS POST: The Road to Ubuntu (or Leopard) - screw the OS, move our apps online with Google NEXT POST: The Road from Windows - Online email {moscomment}
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