I haven’t had much time to work on the calendar thing lately due to the holidays. That will probably continue into the early part of January, with work shaping up to be pretty busy during this time. However, a week or so ago I went ahead and sync’d my published Oracle Calendar data to my Palm. I encountered two issues: #1, The times displayed on the Palm are kinda wonky due to the iCalendar file having times specified in UTC instead of US/Eastern. iCal shows the events OK. The Palm shows the events at the correct times, but the events are displayed with the UTC times appended. Example: “Big meeting (2:30pm GMT)”. This isn’t the end of the world, but I guess if I want to fix it I’ll need to add timezone data to the iCalendar file. I was hoping to avoid this step as it entails computing start and end times for Standard and Daylight time. Oh well.
The second problem is a bit more troubling, and I’ve actually contacted Mark/Space support about it. When I delete an event from the published calendar and then re-sync, the event is not deleted from the Palm. I can duplicate the problem with a very simple published calendar with only a couple events, so this is not a problem with the specific calendar I’m using.. it appears to be more general. I tried hard-resetting the Palm and starting over, thinking maybe it had gotten confused after all my previous mucking, but that didn’t accomplish anything (well, OK, it did accomplish something… it happily blew away my address book and all of my TODO events on both the Palm and the Mac. Joy).
I did hear back from Mark/Space regarding this issue. They suggested trying the latest beta release, and if that didn’t work they gave me a list of steps to follow that will hopefully fix it. I went to download the beta, and unfortunately, it looks like it does not work on my Tungsten E2 (there’s a message there to that effect). I haven’t yet gotten around to trying their other suggested fix. I plan on trying that within the next couple of days, so we’ll see how it goes.
Update 29 Dec 2005: I went back to the Mark/Space testing site today and found that they had posted a new beta, 5.0.3b6. I downloaded and installed it, and it seems to fix the problem. I haven’t pounded on it yet, but it worked for my simple test calendar. I’m optimistic that it’ll work with my Oracle Calendar data. Will test that out shortly.