ICal and Palm Desktop

How to Steal Apple's Calendars

So, Apple's latest little free application is iCal, a calendar program. A major feature of it is that you can download calendars from the web. Stuff like concert tour dates or football schedules. Sounds great, unless you don't have an Mac, in which case it is pretty useless.

Anyways, I wanted the U.S. Holidays on my Palm Vx, and they were available in iCal format, and I just needed to get them into Palm Desktop somehow. So here is what you need to do:

  1. Go to the iCal calendar library and find the calendar you want. The URL will be something like: webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/SAT.ics
  2. Take that URL and replace the "webcal" at the beginning with "http". Giving you something like this: http://ical.mac.com/ical/SAT.ics
  3. The file at that URL is in VCalendar format, which Palm Desktop can import (with a little massaging). Save the contents of that URL as a text file with a .vcs extension. (File>Save As...>Text File)
  4. Open that .vcs file in notepad. Delete all the HTML tags before "BEGIN:VCALENDAR" and after "END:VCALENDAR", if IE put them there. If you don't see any HTML, you're golden.
  5. Change the line that says "VERSION:2.0" to "VERSION:1.0". Palm Desktop will error on version 2 files on principle, but will actually read them just fine.
  6. You may want to add a prefix to the Summary titles since they may not be descriptive. For instance, the movie premier dates just have the title. To add some more info, search and replace "SUMMARY:" with "SUMMARY: Movie:", and now it will say "Movie: Red Dragon" instead of just "Red Dragon".
  7. Go into Windows Explorer and double click the .vcs file. Palm Desktop will show this dialog:

    Even though it only shows one event, answering Yes will import them all.

  8. And you're good to go. Except repeating events don't work. And it doesn't auto-update from the web or anything. But it may save you some typing.

 

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