The final piece of the puzzle is the Palm. I need to get the Palm syncing up with iCal. Apple provides an app called iSync which can do this. However, I tried it and was not impressed. iSync is an intriguing application, but it seems mainly geared towards cell phone type devices. Its support for the Palm seems to be kind of an afterthought. It works, but it doesn’t support a lot of the features on the Palm, particularly with the address book

A more promising looking solution is a commercial product called The Missing Sync. This is a total replacement for Palm Desktop/HotSync that is specifically geared to the Mac. It reportedly integrates very well with iCal and the Mac’s address book. It also includes a lot of nifty extras (internet connection sharing, expansion card mounting, etc).

Missing Sync costs $40, but based on what I read, it’s worth the price. There are two things about it that I would consider negatives:

1. No trial/demo version available I’m willing to look beyond this because of the overwhelmingly positive reviews I’ve read about the product. A lot of people, myself included, like try-before-you-buy, particularly with software. They could probably sell more copies of this if they had a demo version. Let people try it, wonder how they got along without it, and they’ll buy it.
2. Can only be installed on 2 macs Not an issue for me now, as I have only 1 mac, but who knows how many I’ll accumulate over the years? I really hate it when companies cripple their products like this. Still, I’ll live with this despite my philosophical problem with it. If it ever becomes an issue for me, I’ll complain loudly.

Issues aside, it looks like a high quality product, and unless I change my mind about using iCal, I’ll probably give this a go.

No secret now that I’m looking to iCal as my calendaring app of choice, so I’m continuing to put it through its paces. Next up is to try out its publishing feature. Supposedly, I can publish the calendar to any WebDAV server and then access it using a web browser (or subscribe to it using another iCal client).

I didn’t have a WebDAV server sitting around anywhere, so I went ahead and set one up using Apache 2.0.54 with mod_dav/mod_dav_fs. It was pretty easy, basically just load the DAV modules and enable DAV in the appropriate directory (with authentication of course). I can access it with a command-line tool called cadaver, which provides FTP-like access to the WebDAV space. So it looks like everything is good to go on the server side.

I don’t have my Mac with me today, so I’ll try uploading a calendar tonight after I get home.