Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
I tried Syncing with Evolution. It's very good, butn unfortunately it doesn't handle categories, which is a huge problem for me. I did a quick Google search for why this happened, and I found a discussion which slated the categories for the 1.2 release of Evolution. Until that's fixed I'll be sticking with JPilot for now.
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.
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.