Lightning and Dates

september 7, 2007

Since around April, I was using Yahoo! Calendar for my calendaring needs. I did this because I had stopped using iCal, and that is because I have stopped using my Powerbook G4 as my main machine. While Yahoo! Calendar works and has some decent features, it really didn't cut it for me. Recently, JR was trying out calendaring options, so I just had to do it too. I went and tried to use Evolution in conjunction with ics calendar files hosted on a WebDAV share. I don't know why I went and tried Evolution (most likely it is because it is the default email and PIM client installed with most Linux distros) -- I don't like the interface since it's too Outlook'ish, I don't like the email portion and trying to get it to work with ics files on a WebDAV share was impossible. So, it really did not work out. Today, I gave Lightning -- an add-on for Thunderbird -- a try and it worked brilliantly. I could have used Sunbird, which is the stand-alone calendaring project from Mozilla. But, I didn't want to run yet-another-application to do daily stuff, especially since I always have Thunderbird open. Anyways, Lightning is...well, I'll let them explain it:

Lightning brings the Sunbird calendar to the popular email client, Mozilla Thunderbird. Since it's an extension, Lightning is tightly integrated with Thunderbird, allowing it to easily perform email-related calendaring tasks.
Nice! Now I have my work Windows PC and my two Linux notebooks synchronized to two calendars (Home and Work). I need to setup my Powerbook's Thunderbird to do the same. I am thinking that since iCal/iSync does not play nice (it likes to clobber the ics files), I can setup iCal to subscribe read-only to the two calendar files. Then I can use iSync to sync the calendars over to my phone. Then I'll be in business, though my phone's calendar will in essence be read-only, that is OK with me. Now if only I can get PHP iCalendar working. There's something wrong with permissions. I'll figure it out later.


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