Archive for February, 2006

Internet Research: Calendaring

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

I just did a bunch of internet research, as I like to call it, on a whole varity of calendaring programs. Clients, Servers, Javascript, AJAX, Outlook, iCal, Mozilla Calendar, Publish/Subscribe, etc. So, if you are into that kind of thing check this list out. The top few are the ones that excited me the most.

Calendaring

DeskNow – mail, instant messaging and collaboration tools
Sharing Microsoft Outlook Calendar and Contacts
Planzo.com
Hula Project – Hula
iCal Exchange
iCalShare – Share Your iCalendars!
eventSherpa – iCal for Windows
Web Calendar Software – iCal – Event Calendar
hello.php
CosmoHome
Web Calendar Server – Calcium from Brown Bear Software
nat friedman
Calendar – Standards Based Calendar Client Project
UW Calendar Home Page
Sambar Technologies Home Page
Internet Calendar Server & Calendar Hosting
Sun Java System Calendar Server
CalendarServer.com: Publish event schedule on the Web
Building a Simple Calendar Server with Fedora and WebDAV – FedoraNEWS.ORG
iCal Web Calendar Server download and review – web based calendar/scheduler from SnapFiles
CalDAV Projects

Umich Mail

Sunday, February 5th, 2006

For those of you that go to UofM, I can’t stress enough that if you have your own computer, and currently use umich web mail to check email, you NEED to check out Mozilla Thundirbird if you haven’t yet. I’ll make it as easy as possible. Ready?

Why is Thunderbird better than umich webmail?

  • Pressing the delete key makes the email gone… instantly
  • you can select multiple emails at a time and delete them with the delete button
  • you can drag one or more messages into a folder, and they go within a second, usually
  • its all around faster
  • you can get notifications of new messages that popup in the corner similar to AIM

Even if you don’t want to switch, you can still use both. Even I still need webmail when I’m not at my own computer. Umich seems to support Mulberry as another email client, but I’ve only been able to find and/or use it on the Macs in the fishbowl.

You may ask me, wait, so you have to sign up for a Thunderbird account, and get your email forwarded? No, no, a thousand times no. Its the SAME account. You get messages directly from umich. Your email remains on umich servers if you select IMAP, so you can read messages on both the web and Thunderbird and they will always be in sync, unless of course your computer gets disconnected from the internet.

So, ready? Go!

Here is the website to download the program for free:
Mozilla Thunderbird

Here’s the instructions to set it up to talk to umich servers:
Umich Thunderbird Setup Instructions

Enjoy. If you have any problems, questions, or comments that aren’t addressed in this post or in one of the links in it, don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me. Click “contact me” on the right side of my blog.

-Kyle