Crusade To Find A Desktop Calendar

Overview

I have been looking for a desktop calendar application for some time now. The one that has worked for me was Lightning, a Mozilla Thunderbird addon which is also a standalone application called Mozilla Sunbird. I have wanted to switch to a another desktop calendar software because it wasn’t 100% compatible with Windows and Mac version. Every time I copied my profile from one to the other I had to re-install the Lightning addon for the specific OS.

My Recent Headache

On Friday, 19th Septermber 2008 I had a problem receiving my mail and I had established the problem was with Thunderbird. I ended up disabling the Lightning addon to see if it was causing the problem but little did I know this would erase all my calendar settings upon re-activating it. Alas I had yet to put all my settings back on and decided to look for a more convenient way of doing things.

Requirements

Like all things I need I have specific “rules” which need to be met or as close to for it to be usable for me. They are:

• Cross Platform – Windows & Mac minimum with Linux as a bonus
• Bi-directional Synchronization With Google – It must be able to sync both ways to Google Calendar. This has saved all my events from the history books when I had my Thunderbird problems
• Multiple Views – I use month view majority of the time but it must have a list of up coming events as well as the usual daily, weekly views too

You might ask “Why not just use Google Calendar?” Well I prefer to have offline access and it’s faster to do things if my Internet connection is slow.

It doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s surprising how little even meet those above.

Calgoo Calendar

Calgoo Calendar is a free multi-platform calendar. It can sync with Google Calendar as well as others like Outlook, Calgoo Hub, any Ical protocol calendars, etc. It’s based on Java and whilst this means it’s cross platform it does have some lags every now and again. Also this is probably why it doesn’t look as good as Mozilla Sunbird or Lightning

Functions & Features

There are multiple binaries for different platforms and all the calendars in my setup are syncronized up to Google. It does bi-directional synchronizations. Calgoo has views from daily to monthly and has task lists and agendas. The agendas has the option to sync with Facebook. It has the nice ability to minimize to tray so it still runs in the background as well as setting how often it syncs.

Calgoo Mac Version

On the Mac version it looks exactly the same as the Windows version.

Calgoo Calendars

A feature I really liked from Calgoo was the ability to add folders to the calendar list.

Calgoo Google Import

Calgoo Calendar has built in support for Google Calendar. You provide Calgoo with your Google log in details and it retrieves and lists the calendars on your account. You can then select the ones you want to appear in Calgoo. It also sets the calendar colours to the ones set in Google too.

Calgoo Colours

Calgoo doesn’t have a noticeable marker for the current day. It has a small arrow in line with the day number. Also the colours used for events which corresponds to the calendar aren’t particulary attractive nor do they 100% match the shade of the calendar font colour. This may be done on purpose because the event title uses white font.

Calgoo Sidebar

The side bar has month views of the current month and months after it. There is no way to change this and the only customizable part is the ability to drag the calendar list to hide it. It would be nice to change the month view to something else as I predominantly use the month view on the main calendar pane.

Mozilla Sunbird

I tried to get Sunbird working on Microsoft Vista but it wouldn’t let me add any calendars but only navigate to the different screens and dialogue boxes. I checked the “Error Console” and it had loads of them mainly consisting of JavaScript errors.

This was when I gave up and found Calgoo.

A day later and Toby found the fix for the JS problems. It is a Vista specific problem but falling short of re-creating a new profile everything else works fine. You have to recreate a new profile and to gain access to the profile manager you need to type
sunbird.exe -profilemanager in the Start Menu > Run
Delete the

default

profile and create a new one with a name of your choice.

It is nice feature to include addon architecture from Firefox however the XPI addon’s MIME settings only work for Firefox so Thunderbird addons need to be downloaded and installed using Thunderbird’s addon manager instead of double clicking the file and installs automatically. There is also a distinct lack of addons compare to Firefox. You can take this as a good or bad sign.

Sunbird is easy to use and I like the experience even if it lacks some of the features present in Calgoo Calendar. It seems more native and faster than Calgoo

I’m also getting a heads up from Toby that there are problems with alarms and recurring events where the dialogue box does not disappear once the alarms have been dismissed. He had to install the beta release of both Sunbird 0.9 as well as the new Google Provider.

From time to time somewhere between Mozilla Sunbird and Google Provider creates duplicate events and it propagates through to Google Calendar. It’s not a show stopper but it is rather annoying. There isn’t a mass delete option to remove all the duplicate events either.

Summary

I liked Lightning and had used it about a year but Sunbird seems more buggy than Lightning does. It has a habit of duplicating events in my calendars. It’s a pain to delete because it doesn’t have duplicate event finder or mass delete options.

I will stick with Calgoo for now and will have to take a look at Sunbird at a later date when more development work has gone into it. It has been rumoured that the Sunbird will eventually be integrated with Mozilla Thunderbird but at this point in time I hope they don’t and if they do release it before all the bugs are ironed out, I hope they fork it and make a new “product” which combines the two to prevent instability in Mozilla Thunderbird.

I am still open to suggestions for desktop calendaring applications that fit my criteria above.

Mozilla Zine Forum post of Vista work around [Toby Weston]
Mozilla Sunbird & Lightning Website
Google Provider
Mozilla Thunderbird Website

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Review, Software and tagged Bi-directional, calendar application, calendar software, Calgoo, desktop calendar, Google, Linux, mozilla sunbird, mozilla thunderbird, Synchronization, Vista. Bookmark the permalink.

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