One of the things that the new phone has is a calendar application. This I thought would be ideal as a way to store what I’m doing. The Palm has one as well but the format of it’s appointments is woefully inadequate for what I need and the format is proprietary and binary. What I wanted was an application that could read my roster file and convert it into a set of appointments that could then be imported into a calendar.

After a few hours effort I now have a simple library that will read and parse my roster (though not yet all the bells & whistles it could do) and generates an iCal file. The file works fine with Mac’s iCal application and Mozilla’s Sunbird, but the mobile only reads the first event! Doh! Also it’s not obvious how you “import” the files. The best I found was copying the .ics file to the phone and then using FFExplorer to find it and “Open” it – at which point I’m shown the details and asked if I wish to import it. While this is OK as far as it goes, it doesn’t display all the details but rather just the ones that the Calendar app knows about 🙁

I had a look around for an app that would solve this problem but so far no joy. If anyone knows of one it would be good to be given a pointer 🙂 Next on the agenda is more automation of the creation of the file, uploading to the server and an online viewer. Adding a GUI interface is also on the plan, but like all things it’s dependant on time available!