Thunderbird and Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a useful tool; it allows you to, via a web interface, create and track tasks and events much like you can in a calendaring application, such as the calendar component of Microsoft Outlook. And because it is based on the web, you can access it from anywhere you have internet access. But what if you’d want that functionality in a desktop application?
Enter Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird does not have calendar features out of the box, but with a couple of extensions, you can be managing your calendar alongside your email. The bulk of the work is done by Lightning (evidently a counterpart to Thunder-bird), handling the calendar itself. The crucial part of this, though, is an extension called Provider for Google Calendar, which allows the Thunderbird/Lightning combo to interface with Google Calendar.
I will let this tutorial do the talking, as it is where I found out how to do this for myself. I couldn’t put it any better than it already has been.
I will show some of the end result here…
Note the selected date, May 11th. Also note the New Event box in the bottom-middle of the screen. It appears when you double-click a day in Month View or Week View, or on an hour in Day View. It’s a bit complicated, but you can hide the nonessential parts by clicking the << Less button. That reduces the box to everything above the Description field. Upcoming items appear in the list at the bottom-left. Finally, after installing Lightning, you can add some buttons to your toolbar, as seen in the top right. they make the calendar a little more accessible.
This setup could be soooo useful, especially since I have the desktop-based application interfacing with my Google Calendar, and I can still access the calendar online from other places with internet access. And what’s more, the desktop access is through my email client, which is where it will be needed! Now if I can just figure out how to get my Palm PDA to synchronize with the whole thing…
It is worth also noting that Mozilla has another application available called Sunbird, which is exclusively a calendaring application. The current stable version does not support the Google provider extension, but rumor has it that the next stable release will. When this becomes the case, Sunbird may be a worthy application for scheduling tasks and events, as it will also be able to connect to a Google Calendar. On the other hand, some people prefer to have their email and calendar all in one application, much like Outlook. If you would prefer a separate application for calendars, note that Sunbird and Lightning are being developed in parallel (they are both part of the Calendar Project), as they share a lot of features and functionality.