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Mozilla Email & Calendar PDA Synchronization?
jark writes "Outlook is, for the most part, the industry standard for contact management, personal information management and email use in the corporate workplace. We are looking in to deploying Mozilla across our network, included with the Calendar project, but have one last necessary hurdle: PalmOS synchronization. Are there currently any applications that will sync Mozilla mail, address books and calendar events with PalmOS based handhelds? If not, are there any plans in the works for this to become a reality?"
fp
posters that spell Microsoft with a or spell it MicroCrap or something posters that glorify a feature that Linux has that BSD or Solaris as had for years and list this reason as the most important reason to switch over posters that say Slackware is better because you have to compile all of the applications for yourself Rob Maldas arrogance frequent spelling and grammar mistakes Im not talking something really obscure or a minor technicallity in English either Im talking substituting loose for lose or theyretheirthere Really easily corrected mistakes Any halfway decent fifth grader could pick up on these errors people that post a mirror to a site that has been Slashdotted which normally would be nice but is hosted on a cable modem that is soon Slashdotted page widening random quashing of posts that dont agree with the Slashdot mindset really annoying sigs unhumorous jokes that have to be explained to the audience If your joke has to be explained its not funny BOYCOTT RIAA and I cant wait to see Episode II all in the same day Rob Maldas childish obsession with legos the Slashdot crew doesnt have any other jobs other than Slashdot yet it seems it was better run when Rob was running it on a Multia in college in his spare time the page limit with the subscription The expulsion of Signal 11 ranting paranoid articles whenever there APPEARS to be a GPL violation with no verification whatsoever Just a bunch of ranting posts about freedom for that matter no verification of articles at all I wish I could count the number of times Slashdots been scammed on two hands but its been so many April Fools articles on Slashdot THESE ARENT FUNNY I wasnt going to explain but whatever Okay lets say you run a website On April Fools you post say ONE or TWO fake pieces of news along with the real news This way some people are fooled By posting ALL fake news and jokes no one falls for the prank no one buys Lokis games but there is a big mystery when they go out of business no NNTP frontend to Slashdot direct links to bugzilla continuing tightening of the troll filters to the point where even normal posts are rejected by some stupid criteria self righteous posters who want everything under the sun to be Open Source even though they have never written a line of code in their life whenever an article on a new scripting language is posted all of the C users chime in but its not as fast as C shortly after all the assembly users chime in assembly is the fastest predictably right after that someone says why dont we all just use machine code anecdotes on your grandmother using Linux to check her email and whatnot this ALONE proves that Linux is better than Windows for ALL uses cultlike devotion to Linux reserve your fanaticism for a church not a kernel someone is not less of a person if they dont use Unix posters who think that BeOS is having a bad moment and will surely rise to defeat all other operating systems posters who think Palm will open the source to BeOS for no reason at all people who think that Amiga isnt dead The new virtual Amiga doesnt count people who think that OS2 isnt dead Ecomstation doesnt count people who bemoan the loss of OS2 while thinking it was a big conspiracy completely IGNORING the fact that IBM did not advertise we all KNOW OS2 was technically superior to Windows at the time You dont have to bedazzle us with tales of running all the latest Windows and DOS applications aside native OS2 apps Weve heard it all before We know it WAS better people who think that this is the last year ever well ever have to hire C programmers because as we all know Java is going to kill it off this is a good one Completely expositionary articles such as Surprised by Weath in which ESR BRAGGED about how rich he was and how he wasnt going to give us any money NO SIR bitchslapping benchmarks that pit say Linux lastest revision against FreeBSD 30 or something old and useless how banner ads for the site only link to other OSDN sites any links to nytimescom when someone writes a comment with H to signify deletions the moderation rtbl meta moderation people that spell Red Hat as RedCrap
Were the people you gave the Palm Pilots to worth it? Is it paying off for you?
the other, other fp
I think this is a major promo issue for Mozilla, since more and more people are getting handhelds.
I have a WinCE device, and have to jump through several loops to sync my IMAP mail at work - using Outlook. Isn't that awkward?
If people could get a simple, generic calendar/mail/contacts system that worked on both their PC and (any-brand) handheld, they wouldn't miss IE or Outlook for a second.
No sig to see here. Move along.
The calendar project is very much unfinished work, I don't think it would be a good idea to distribute it to non technical users right now. Currently the work seems to focus on getting the basic features of a calendering tool right. I suspect it will take quite a bit of time before somebody will start thinking about how to export to specific PDAs.
The tool itself looks really cool already (a zoom option would be nice, I don't like scrolling) and no doubt it will continue to develop rapidly. I think that it will be moved into the Mozilla source tree once it is in a more useable state. I don't think that that will happen before 1.1, though.
Jilles
Have you considered Evolution? You didn't specify if you are on a 'doze network, but if not, Evo apparently has built-in hooks for palm sync'ing.
I've not used it, but it looks quite polished.
Also, it goes without saying that if you don't have Linux deployed across your network, the work involved with that would likely outweigh the benefits...
Whenever I see this, it just makes me wish that most Unix apps- whether they were written against GTK+, Qt, KDE, Xlib, GTK+GNOME, Qt+KDE, XForms, FLTK, Prima, Motif, whatever- has some sort of AppleScript-like API. I know that KDE has DCOP, but that's for KDE apps, not all Qt apps. GNOME has CORBA, but again, only for GNOME apps, not all GTK+ apps.
$ pdaCal = $pda->application("Qtopia:Addressbook");
Hell, they don't even have to be standard across toolkits. I'd be extra happy if they all just responded to XML-RPC.
Now, if we had something like Apple's OSA (Open Script Architecture, what AppleScript ties in to) in these GUI toolkits, we could write a perl script to act like a "hotsync conduit" on Windoze/Mac OS with the Palm desktop.
Except, it wouldn't have to be a thousand line pain in the ass C++ app. It'd just a 10 line perl script, looking something like:
use ZaurusSync;
use MozillaOSA;
$pda = ZaurusSync->new();
$pda->openOn("/dev/ttyS1");
$cal = MozillaOSA->new()->application("Mozilla:Addr essbook");
foreach $name ( $cal->personKeys ) {
#getPerson returns undef if she doesn't exist
if ($pdaCal->getPerson($person) eq $person->asZaurusPerson) {#perhaps further checking
} else {
$pdaCal->newPerson( $person->asZaurusPerson);
}
}
$pda->close();
Now, this is hypothetical perl, it won't work, and the parts that normally would are probably malformed.
But this sort of thing is *so* far from impossible. It just has to be figured in from the start of a toolkit or even an app, which could implement it's own.
If Mac OS can do it, why can't we Unix peeps?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
What I do, is:
- I set up a personal imap server. Fetchmail is also running on that box.
- I use evolution to sync my calendar/contacts/etc
- I can use both evo and mozmail to check out my imap mailbox
- I use programs like mailsync to synchronize my palm straight with the imap server.
That last suggestion (involving mailsync) is the most useful one. Tools like mailsync are possible because IMAP is a modern, flexible protocol. I really wish email providers and programmers would exploit it more fully, and stop pretending that POP-based tools are cutting-edge.
Why deploy a brand new browser? Why deploy something that just came out? Sure it's been tested and tested and tested and peer reviewed, but that guarantees you nothing.
IE is free. It comes with windows. It has its share of security problems but they are easily fixed and deployed. How easy do you think it will be to patch all your copies of Mozilla when something happens? And it will happen. Will you be able to use Active Directory or NT Policy patch to manage all your PC's? I assume since you don't like MS, you don't have SMS installed.
How much time do you want to "waste" getting people up to speed with a system they don't know anything about? Deploy Mozilla at home or at your friends' houses. Geek it up somewhere else.
Suck it up and go with MS - you might not like it, but all the people you support - your CUSTOMERS for all intents & purposes might not like Mozilla. They know how to use IE. They don't want to learn anything new. They'll resent you if you take away their ability to use their Palms.
My $0.02, to be sure, but look at the big picture. It's great to stand up for and support what you believe in, but I have yet to hear a good solid argument for the kind of thing you're trying to do.
I found some stuff in the Mozilla Status Updates that may interest you:
June 14th MailNews Update
The comments in the reports were written by Netscape employees. It looks like Palm sync functionality is in the early planning stages, so Netscape probably want it for Buffy, the codename for their next release after 7.0 (7.0 is codenamed MachV). Basically, it looks like it's in development but it probably won't be available in Mozilla for some time.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all web browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape 6 is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Netscape developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Mozilla is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Mozilla.org leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of Mozilla. How many users of Galeon are there? Let's see. The number of Mozilla versus Galeon posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Galeon users. Chimera posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Galeon posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Chimera. A recent article put Netscape 6 at about 80 percent of the Mozilla market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Netscape 6 users. This is consistent with the number of Netscape 6 usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Mozilla, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and will probably be taken over by AOL who sell another troubled browser. Now AOL is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among browser dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dyingTo be honest, I think that you will find that users want more from an office calendar these days - they want to do group views, book meeting rooms, search for free time in others diaries etc. Exactly what outlook/groupwise/notes does.
You could try moz + steltor calendar (www.steltor.com) as a reasonable compromise. This has agenda synching tools (for CE, psion and palm).
http://www.syncml.orgn et/
http://sync4j.sourceforge.
Does anyone have any practical experience with Syncml? I can't claim to have any experience with it personally, but I get the impression that it is supposed to be THE transfer format for any small device - phone, PDA etc, so why not create/use that?
I know that not everyone is onboard with Syncml, but creating proprietarysyncml filters seems more efficient that creating new proprietaryproprietary filters every time someone comes up with a new email program. That way, Mozilla, Evolution etc could all benefit from the same set of converters.
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm hoping someone else will.
...us poor old Psionists! A unique opportunity to save another endagered species
-- Serge K. Keller