I’ve been following the development of the Mozilla Calendar application for several years now, and what for awhile seemed an abandoned project has seen much development and improvement over the past several months (or so it seems to me).
Tonight I downloaded the pre-release build of the forthcoming 0.7 release to test it. The standalone client — Sunbird — looks very nice, but further testing will determine how stable and functional it has become.
Regardless, since I like to access my calendars from the office as well, and I don’t like having to carry a laptop back and forth, I was about to configure another WebDav section on a server when I remembered that the Jungledisk client for Amazon’s S3 service provides a WebDav interface when it is running (making it easily accessible via Gnome)… Since I have Jungledisk installed and running both at home and at work, I thought I’d give that a try. A little bit of trial-and-error later, and it seems to be working as expected.
To use this method, you must first have Jungledisk installed and running, which is merely a matter of downloading the client for your particular OS, unpacking it, and running it. In my case, from Ubuntu:
wget http://downloads.jungledisk.com/jungledisk/junglediskbeta.tar.gz
tar zxf junglediskbeta.tar.gz
cd jungledisk
./junglediskmonitor &
The first time you run it, it will ask for your S3 credentials. Once it is running, you should have a WebDav server running on localhost:2667. To check, from Ubuntu Gnome simply go to Places > Connect to Server. Use Webdav (HTTP) as the Service type, and in the Server: field enter localhost and in the Port: field, enter 2667. Feel free to also enter a Name for the connection, and then click Connect. If everything is working, you should now see a display of the contents of your Jungledisk.
Now, if you haven’t already, fire up Sunbird or open up your Lightning-enhanced Thunderbird. From the File menu, choose New Calendar.
On the first screen of the Create New Calendar window, choose On the Network and click Next.
On the next screen, select iCalendar (ICS) for the Format, and in the location field, enter http://localhost:2667/the_name_of_your_new_calendar.ics and click Next.
On the last page, simply give the calendar a meaningful name and pick a color for the entries. In this example, I created a calendar of TV shows which I want to try to remember to watch. Having them in a separate file allows me to turn it off when I don’t want to see those entries.
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