hotsync

Google Calendar is an awesome web application. And despite my best efforts, Google doesn’t want me to use it. It came out back in April, and still lacks WebDAV support. As a result it’s read-only for client side applications. If they supported WebDAV so we could have full access to calendars, it would be infinitely more usable. I just don’t understand how it launched without. Who knows, perhaps one day it will catch up.

Ideally it would come out with Sync conduits for popular platforms: WebDAV (covers iCal and Sunbird), HotSync (Palm) and Blackberry.

Until then I still can’t figure out how I’d use it on a daily basis. It’s a shame, it’s an awesome app, but unfortunately it’s shortcomings are fatal.

Recently my Sony Clie has been giving me the following error when I try to HotSync:

— Date Book
– Your device does not support events spanning midnight. The end time
was set to 11:55 on both the Palm Desktop and the device for this event:
[event description

I finally found the problem.

You need to right click on the HotSync icon in the system tray (or open the HotSync Application) and go to “Custom…”. Then find “Datebook”, and set it to “Do Nothing” and check to make it default. Then make sure “Calendar” is set to Sync. Press “OK”, then do your sync.

That fixes one of the most annoying problems I’ve seen in a long time. Apparently there are two versions of the Palm Desktop Calendar HotSync API’s, each with their own conduit. Even if your event goes from 9:25 AM – 10:30 AM, you can get this annoying error if your using the wrong conduit. By making this change, your computer and PDA can communicate in the same language.

Perhaps someone else will be able to make use of this little tip I figured out. As for me, it might be about time to start thinking of a replacement for this PDA.