Accept no substitutes

MisAdventures with Google Calendar

It loves me not. Google Calendar is live and that’s nice. But getting it loaded with my agenda is not working that great. I’m using Oracle Calendar and PalmDeskTop synced. I try to export from Oracle and although I get several formats out, none will go into Gcalendar. However I can get them to just drag and drop into Palm. So I try exporting from there. No luck. Gcalendar hates the formats. No matter which ones I try. Then I try putting the exported file into iCal. Hey it works! For iCal. Not Gcalendar. So I export from iCal in .ics format (as described by Gcalendar as the thing to do). I can preview the text in FireFox. It looks just right. I try to upload to Gcalendar. I get “Failed to import events: Failed to upload ical/csv file.” Sometimes I get a timeout message instead. I could be hitting a load problem on Gcalendar and will try again later. But YIKES this is frustrating. But hey I now have iCal, PalmDeskTop, my Treo and Oracle Calendar all in sync.

UPDATE:
Somehow the iCal formated file finally made a successful upload and I now have a GooCal in operation. Now to learn more about it. SMS for verification of the alerts was so slow getting here that I’m lead to believe that the SMS alert will be next to useless. I haven’t tested to see if the slowdown is at Google or at Cingular tho.

6 Comments

  1. Brittany

    what is this thing about

  2. Harry Nicholos

    Hi Paul…Was the successful ical upload the original “oracle”.ics file or the “appleiCal”.ics file?

  3. Paul

    i believe it was the apple version of .ics but both are fairly simple plain text files as i recall. i think my upload issues were mostly due to the load on the google servers that first day of the calendar announcement.

  4. Harry Nicholos

    I upgraded my window’s client to the latest 10.x.y.z version and the upload worked like a charm. I’ll do an upgrade of my mac’s Ocal client next week and see if I get the same success…Cheers, Harry

  5. Paul

    My biggest complaint is that I like to sync my calendars so that my Treo, my Mac and Oracle all say the same thing. They do. But syncing the Google Calendar regularly isn’t yet an option. Perhaps their publishing of their API will lead to a remedy for that — eventually.

  6. Da_Truff

    I can’t believe that Google launched their Calendar without having the API ready and without any interface for sync with Palm that bypasses Outlook. Yes, I know this is “beta” but all of their products are “beta” and that is no excuse for a half-baked application anyway.

    Shoot this dead horse, go back to the drawing board, and come back with a real calendar app that is worthy of the google name.

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