FJ Software

I know I'm speaking in my own interest here (even as a follow-up to previous questions), but I guess it would be great if you added another option: not only sync with Outlook or Rainlendar, but sync it with any iCal format calendar, making it generic and using more of an open protocl, making MPE even more interesting (and valuable)

You know, Vista has an iCal compatible Calender built in as well.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/forhome/calendar.mspx

sync galore!

A native iCal-Sync would not work correctly cause every calendar-app has its own special things in it, so the sync would not run correct. Sunbird and Rainlendar is iCal-Based but they have their own things in it.

Maybe I'm a bit naive, but doesn't every iCal app have to comply to certain base naming conventions and structures?

I'd guess every app uses some add-ons fields to store some extra-app-specific information, but one could ignore that.

Multiple applicatiosn, for instance, work with a remote calender host like www.iCalx.com (works for Thunderbird and Rainlendar, Apple iCal etc)

If you'de just implement the specifications as given on : http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445

If you take a look into the .ics files (As I'm sure you already have) couldn't you just filter out he info that is required by the specifications and leave out the application-specific info?

For instance, in my .ics file that is used both by Rainlendar en Thunderbird, I find some mozilla-only fields like

X-MOZILLA-RECUR-DEFAULT-UNITS
X-MOZILLA-ALARM-DEFAULT-LENGTH

and some Rainlendar only fields like:

X-RAINLENDAR-LASTALARMACK

But when you would compare the files created by different iCal apps, you could check out the data that is really important to implement basic ICal functionality (what is mainly important) without implementing the entire RFC.

Explanation of the core specifications of iCal can also be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar

I think the main challenge lies in the publishing to remote calendars.

I see you are well informed - I'm too

The diffrence between us is that i've already tried to make the native calendar-sync, and you have only read the manuals. I said it works - but not good.

1. Sunbird needs the special X-MOZILLA-TAGS, otherwise the events are not correctly parsed
2. The most apps uses different UIDs. Sunbird,Rainlendar uses usual Windows-GUIDS, Google uses other UIDs - MyPhoneExplorer must be able to create UIDs.
3. Rainlendar cannot parse the alarmdate and has no field for Locality (the old Version)

I have enought to do with users which cannot come clear with the integrated syncronisation - which should work perfect. MyPhoneExplorer is a easy-to-use tool. I will not make features which work for 50%.

If i get Vista (the real official version, no RC or beta) then i'll take a look on sync with Vista.

That's what I feared, that you already had given it a try. I did not mean to annoy you, I'm just a bit enthusiastic about iCal, and a bit puzzled why not more programs support a generic format like it. But that is the old 'standards' issue.

I'm very content with your rate of development and activity anyway.
Good that you stick with your principles of your software being 100%

Guess I'll have to wait until you are a Vista Victim too.

You know why standards are so great: there are so many to choose from...

I think there are even both standards for 'iCal' and 'iCalendar'

It would be great to syncronise the notes.

This is a great prog.

As I understand it, what I would like to see is the ability for the program to IMPORT ical files, specifically, the new holiday files.

Such as the many multinational ical holiday files here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/holidays.html

As far as the UIDs go, all that means is that it is a Unique IDentifier.
One way to do that is to take the ICAL information (without the UID) (as serialized text) and calculate the SHA-1 hash over that text.

The event doesn't have to have a UID in the phone's calendar (unless the phone supported iCal, which apparently some or many don't), MPE just has to convert the phone event into iCal, calculate the UID (via SHA1) and add it into the true iCal representation.

All of the "X-..." values in an iCal file represent application specific information. It is not your responsibility to add those in, unless you want to support that application specifically. In which case, you'll need to get the developer docs from that application team to get a list of all of their tags and their meanings to see if it even maps to anything useful for phone users.

The other feature MPE would need is something that converts iCal files into the data formatted for the phone.

You might be able to accomplish this by writting something that converts your holiday file to/from iCal format.

Since version 1.2 its possible to import iCal-Files.