Monday, April 17, 2006

Google's Summer of Code 2006

Projects which interest me so far:

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Calendars (and their mini-reviews)

It figures — a week after I get Mozilla Sunbird + PHP iCalendar working for me, Google comes out with this Google Calendar thing. I'd say it looks like the web equivalent of Mozilla Lightning. I'd use it, but I already put work into my system, and it seems that you can't publish via a desktop calendar program (i.e., WebDAV/CalDAV protocol or equivalent) My question is, where's the Google Talk integration? It would be useful to get an IM about an upcoming event.

My problem with calendaring systems is that they tend to be too bulky; I don't need to have my schedules integrated with my mail client (e.g., Evolution, Outlook, or Lightning). Right now, Sunbird is a bit too slow for any computer I have at the moment (although, I am eagerly awaiting the time when it is ported to XULRunner). I've found two lightweight calendar programs so far: Dates and Orage. I haven't gotten Orage to "work" yet because Xfcalendar (the previous incarnation) is still installed on my computer (and I like having a clock on my screen), but based solely on the screenshots, it lacks multi-calendar support and remote calendar support (i.e., publishing), both of which are pretty important to me as features go, especially considering the workload I have this quarter. With regards to Dates, there hasn't even been a release, but it's pretty — it does this neat little "zoom" transition between time modes (e.g., day → week). It also suffers from the same lack of features as Orage. However, both have a small memory footprint (Orage due to Xfce's philosophy, and Dates because it's designed for small devices).

All this kind of stuff makes me want to brush up on my C skills. It sucks (and seems rather ironic to me) that my horrid schedule is causing this particular coding curiosity.