SpawnPoint

After getting upset that I could not sync my Google Calendar with my iPod Touch (on linux), I developed a program to assist me with doing just that. If you are interested, continue reading...

This program is for linux users who want to sync their iPod/iPhone's calendar, but do not want to boot into Windows. You can now easily update your calendar information by using this program and executing a few other commands. I intend to eventually have this program run on the iPod/iPhone alone as a native app. The program is designed to read in an iCalendar file, and generate an iPod Calendar database for use by the Calendar program.

You will need a jailbroken iPod/iPhone with OpenSSH on it. Try googleing around for "JailBreak" for more information on how to unleash the power of your iPod Touch/iPhone. Also note that this is not a windows application. If you want to do this through Windows, you don't even need my application -- Microsoft Outlook and iTunes will do it for you.

You can download the file at: http://ePowerservices.com/personal/ical2sqlite-0.1.tar.gz

Once downloaded, extract the file and follow the instructions in README file.

Eventually I will move this application on to the iPod/iPhone itself so you can sync by WiFi to your online calendar. Perhaps in a later release though. This program will probably be only helpful to about 3 people on the face of the planet, but that's OK -- it has done wonders for me!

ntetreau @ 2007-12-18 05:05:45
Hi Wayetender,
thanks for sharing your efforts to sync the calendar. It seems to work well for me even though I get an error message while running the script you included.

With that said, I was wondering if you'd be willing to ad syncing from ipod/iphone ----> ical/computer. This way we could add events on the iphone and later on sync them on the computer.

As for wifi syncing, you may want to contact Patrick of Syncevolution (http://www.estamos.de/projects/SyncML/). He already has full sync between evolution and webserver (Funambol or Scheduleworld). The webserver include a sync with google calendar. Then, you can install the Funambol app via Installer.app to sync your contacts from the webserver with the ipod/iphone contact list. I believe/hope they will join forces with the ToDoList app (which will include Notes as well) but they lack the Calendar piece of the puzzle, which you have.

Anyway, just my two cents, but so far, I really enjoy your works, thanks again!

ntetreau @ 2007-12-27 05:07:48
Lukas, thanks again for your great effort. We have a lengthy thread on the ubuntu forum on the iphone and I incorporated a short howto to use your "ical2sqlite" program. superm1 is in charge of packaging all the scripts that facilitate the use of the ipod touch and iphone with ubuntu. He was impressed with your developments and decided to package it in is PPA and also propose it for inclusion in the next Ubuntu version (Hardy).

I am sure everybody, including me, would appreciate if you wanted to participate in the effort to include your program into ubuntu and to extend it's functionality. Please visit the thread here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=588246&page=24 and join the development here: https://code.launchpad.net/ical2sqlite . Mario, who started the bzr repository, is also the main developer behind the packaged scripts and Mythbuntu.

Thanks again and hope to see you keep pushing for this development.

Suger @ 2008-01-02 07:38:32
Well, first, kudos for the great work. Nevertheless, I haven't been able to use it completely because of two bugs. I know a little C but nothing about sqlite, so I'm not really able to correct them myself, even if I'd be willing to help.

Here they are. The first seems to be purely SQLite related : I'm french and do have some event descriptions in which there are two apostrophes ( ' ), something like " Début de l'évacuation de l'éléphant ". In this case, i get an sqlite error message

ical2sqlite basic.ics
Error: INSERT INTO Event (summary, location, description, start_date, start_tz, end_date, all_day, calendar_id) VALUES ...

As I only have few of , I suppressed manually the apostrophes, but here I run in the second bug, where all i get is an error message

icalerror.c:99: BADARG: Bad argument to function
ical2sqlite: icalerror.c:100: icalerror_set_errno: Assertion `0' failed.
Abandon (core dumped)

All I can see is that something, somewhere, is sending a bad argument to an ical function, and that there is a bug in icalerror (namely, that the routine icalerror_warn refuses BADARG as an argument). But that doesn't help me much on the reason of the error. Any idea ?

joooo @ 2008-04-12 05:11:50
This script is exactly that what I'm looking for! But I get the same error as Suger.
Because of this error I couldn't test the program and his functionality, but I have got an idea for the next version: With ical2sqlite --add [file] the sqlite file should not be overwritten, the events should be added. That makes it possible to add more than one calendar, e.g. some Google Calendar files.