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I'm a Mac user at home, and a Windows user at work. I have my mail on a IMAP server, so I can read it in either systems without any frills. In the iMac I use Mail.app, and in the Windows box I use Thunderbird, and everything works fine. But I have a problem with my calendar. I love the iCal design, and I would like to have it in my Windows box. Not only for scheduling meetings, but also for ToDo management, sharing and publishing other calendars. I went to the web and to all the sites with "web application lists" on it, but didn't find any real good web calendar application: I tryied Planzo.com, but has a polluted user interface, and Kiko.com, which don't work in Safari, so I had to improvise.

After some googling, I found Yagoon, and if you take a minute to jump to their site, you will notice the resemblance with Apple iCal. For 30 bucks, this could be my best buy of the year, but wait, I can try it for 60 days, so it seems is going to be my best buy for next year. Ok, I have my iCal look-a-like in my Windows box. Now, how can I sincronize the two applications?

So, I went to .Mac pages for prices and conditions, but 99 dollars per year seems to much for a WebDAV server. Back to Google, I found iCalExchange, which is a free service for sharing iCal files. Ok, so now I have my "synchronizer". I tryied to publish and subscribe the same calendar from iCal and Yagoon, but I got a lot of permission errors, so I had to go for a two calendar solution.

I created two calendars on iCalExchange, named bonnie and clyde. iCal publishes (writes) in the bonnie calendar, and subscribes (reads) the clyde calendar. In the iCal, bonnie is coloured green and clyde is coloured red. This way, I know that I can change, erase or create green events, but I should not do nothing to the red ones. On the Yagoon side, it publishes to the clyde calendar (green) and subscribes the bonnie calendar (red), implementing the same colour code.

At the end, I can use two different applications in two different operating systems, having the same user interface and full syncronization (it even syncronizes ToDos). All for less than 30 dollars, and thanks to iCalExchange. Ahhh, and I can see my calendar live going directly to iCalExchange homepage. Rui, feel free to use this to write a new HOWTO for your blog ;)

From Ajaxian I found that OpenLaszlo added XMLHttpRequest in is version 3.1. I didn't know what OpenLaszlo was, so I decided to take a peek:

The OpenLaszlo platform allows developers to create applications with the rich user interface capabilities of desktop client software and the instantaneous no-download Web deployment of HTML. These applications run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems from a single XML code base.

Since a video is better than a thousand images, watch this 3m video (2MB) and take your own conclusions.

What if Google will do most everything wrong, and is competitors don’t? A tale from Jack Shafer (Slater’s editor) called The Great Google Wipeout give us an interesting view of what could be a possible future.

A very interesting presentation from Lawrence Lessig at OSCON 2002. A true call for arms in the fight against control and copyright, a must read. 32 minutes plus download time (8MB).

Yesterday I spent all night catching up my feeds. Due to personal reasons, I spent the last three days offline, and when I finally get to my bloglines account I had thousands of new posts to read. So I decided to do something about it (besides reading them), clean up my blogroll and add some new feeds I'm interested in. As a result, I have now more 6 blogs to read daily (ouch!).