You may have caught my post about Dateline, a cool, minimal calendar that sits right on your desktop. Dateline's great, but it's Mac-only. Windows users don't have to feel left out anymore, though. Thin Calendar is a Dateline-inspired Windows app that does much the same thing, but gives you access to your Google Calendar appointments instead of the Mac-only iCal.

Thin Calendar has a semi-transparent, unobtrusive interface that won't get in the way of your other windows. It's great for people who frequently need to use the Google Calendar web interface. When you can't find a desktop client you like, sometimes it's better to have a quick, attractive-looking way to get to the website. You can't change the look of Thin Calendar the way you can with Dateline, but it looks nice enough that you won't mind seeing it on your desktop.

[via instant fundas]

On today's This Week in Google, Gina Trapani presented a tip on how to synchronize your Google Calendar to iCal on a Mac. As it turns out, it is possible to subscribe to sub-calendars, but it's not immediately obvious how to do so. The same holds true on the iPhone.

If you've attempted to synchronize your Google Calendar to your iPhone only to be disappointed that it only allows you to synchronize one calendar, you'll be happy to discover that although it's somewhat hidden, there is a way to synchronize multiple calendars.

Once you configure your iPhone to synchronize with your Google account using your phone's Exchange functionality, you should have your contacts and primary calendar items synchronizing. To then choose what other calendars to display, use the instructions given on this page. They will instruct you to visit m.google.com/sync on your phone, which gives you the option to set some sync settings.

One big frustration with the iPhone's calendar is that though it displays multiple calendars in different colors, it doesn't give you any control over a given calendar's color. With some patience and fiddling, you can use the Google Sync settings described above to enable one calendar at at time and get them set to the color you want. If your primary calendar is the wrong color, it's harder to make it switch, but you can do it by disabling calendar synchronization entirely on the phone, then changing which calendars are synchronized via the Google Sync page, then re-enabling it. It takes trial and error, but with enough patience you can get things set up just as you want, as long as the colors you want consist of red, blue, orange, green, and/or purple.

Linux-powered netbook users that have been missing their doctors' appointments and kids' school plays because operating a calendar application on their tiny portable is, at best, clunky and painful, can finally breathe an accurately-scheduled sigh of relief. Srinivasa Ragavan, who is one of the user interface developers for the open-source Evolution personal information manager project, has taken it upon himself to develop netbook-happy frontends for the calendar and mail portions of Evolution.

The calendar interface, as shown off on his blog, makes use of the entire screen for the calendar view. It features a handy upper toolbar for navigation, and a powerful drop-down menu for selecting more viewing options. The mail frontend, named "Anjal," features such optimizations as a similar upper toolbar, a tabbed interface (something soon to be seen in Thunderbird 3), and Gmail-esque threading.

Srinivasa hasn't yet released any working source for the calendar interface, but the Anjal mail project is available for anyone willing to install Moblin on their netbook, or (for even more fun) build it from source.

[via All About Netbooks]

BusyCal is a calendar app for OS X, and its developers would like you to think of it as "iCal Pro." It's designed for families and small groups, and includes a handful of syncing features that make collaborating on a calendar a lot easier. BusyCal syncs to Google Calendar, and it syncs to multiple machines over a Bonjour network, which is ideal for a multi-user home or an office.

Design-wise, it's like iCal with a lot of nice usability improvements. It's close enough in terms of layout and features that iCal users shouldn't have any trouble switching, and it imports your iCal calendars automatically when you start it up for the first time. Among many, many other features, BusyCal also does iPhone syncing, multi-user editing, and a customizable list view. If you're already an iCal or Google Calendar user, it's well worth giving BusyCal a shot.

Let me be totally honest here: I am not the world's leading expert on GTD. Nor have I completely settled on a true, universal solution -- because I don't think one really exists. Like most complex problems, there are many approaches, and very few true solutions. Plus, everyone has a different workflow and circumstance, so there's no way to prescribe something for everyone. That said, you will find patterns in GTD implementations (which is kind of the point, especially if you're adhering to a particular type of system -- Behance's Action Method or Zen to Done or whatever).

The point of GTD is pretty simple: get things accomplished effectively and efficiently. How you do that is by 1) making sure you are collecting everything you need to do, 2) managing the lists of to-do's and supporting materials, 3) acting upon the items on the lists in an efficient way. Simple in concept, and devilishly complex in action. It's that big, gray fuzzy area people have so much trouble with, since GTD is a process with a set of tools, not a paint-by-numbers exercise. Over the coming months I'll keep tweaking my workflow and reporting what I've found. We'll take a look at some popular systems, and ways to craft your own in different configurations.

As I said, everyone works a certain way, and there's no one-size-fits-all approach. I'll try to take into account the various approaches to GTD. Contexts, for example, are a variable for many people. Contexts in GTD refer to the "where" you're likely to do something. You don't need to see your "buy milk" to do at work, do you? Contexts help keep lists separate. Some people like a broad set of contexts, like @work and @home and perhaps a couple more. Other folks are meticulous with contexts and creating numerous sub-tasks with proper tags within each.

This week I'll lay out some ground rules for those of you looking to get started with GTD quickly, and what you can expect when choosing a set of tools. But most importantly, what are the things you need to do to ensure you'll actually use whatever system you choose?

Dateline is a slick little Mac app that adds a clean little one-line calendar to your desktop. You can adjust the width of the calendar, and change the window level so it's floating on top of your windows or flush with the desktop. Double-clicking on a date will open that date in iCal, so Dateline's minimal featureset isn't a liability at all.

A couple of tricks you should know about using Dateline: first, you can hide the dock icon using a checkbox in preferences. Second, without that dock icon, the fastest way to open Dateline preferences if you need to change something is by control-clicking the calendar strip. If you're having trouble doing this, switch the display level of Dateline to "desktop icons" instead of "desktop." Dateline is nothing revolutionary, but I often find myself opening Google Calendar in my browser just to see what day of the week some upcoming appointment falls on, and Dateline saves me the trouble.

[via Daring Fireball]

Google Calendar for iPhone and Android just got an important update that makes it a lot more viable as your main mobile option for keeping track of events. Specifically, you can now edit events directly from the mobile interface. According to the Official Google Mobile Blog, editing events in mobile calendar was the number one request from users on Google Product Ideas.

This move makes so much sense. It's nice to have a calendar you can check at a glance -- and with Google Calendar, you'll still see your recently viewed events even when your device doesn't have an Internet connection -- but it's a huge handicap if you can't change your RSVP status or other details about your appointments. If you were unsure about switching to Google Calendar because it lacked editing features, you might want to reconsider now.

I'm quite the fan of BusyMac Software's very excellent BusySync application for Mac OS X. It's always been a great (and ridiculously easily ) way to share calendars over your local network using the Mac's built-in zero-config Bonjour technology.

Today at Macworld Expo, the company has announced that an all-new application, BusyCal, is coming later in the year. The application, which is marketed as iCal Pro, promises 'the beauty and simplicity of iCal with the power of BusySync's ... calendar sharing and syncing technology'.

On top of all the regular calendaring that you'd expect, the application will ship with:

• Bonjour, iPhone & Google Syncing
• Multi-user editing
• Calendar permissions and security
• Offline editing
• Graphics, icons, themes and sticky notes
• Weather
• Rich text

The application, when it ships, will require Mac OS X Leopard and cost $40 per computer. If you already own BusySync, or purchase it before BusyCal ships ($25), you can upgrade to BusyCal for $10.

If you prefer to keep your GTD application on the desktop instead of using a web app like Remember the Milk, WinWorkBar is worth giving a try.

It's less than a 600kb download and packs a ton of functionality into a tidy sidebar. Features include a time and date display, calendar, task list, and notepad.

Tasks can be created as a one time occurrence or repeating event and can span multiple days. You can also specify percentage complete, not just whether or not a task is finished. The task view can be filtered a number of different ways, including progress, category, priority, or date (creation, change, etc.).

Notes can also be assigned to a range of dates - helpful if you've got an important event coming up and want to be reminded repeatedly as it approaches.

Hotkeys are supported for task and note creation and to show or hide the sidebar.

By default the sidebar autohides, though it's perfectly suited to full-time display on a widescreen monitor. A quick click on the menu button can turn off hiding. WinWorkBar also places an icon in the system tray at startup which provides right-click access to creating new notes and tasks.

WinWorkBar is a free application for Windows only.

Deadline is a really great web-based alternative to the standard desktop to-do apps. There are several ways to interact with it and access your to-do list, including via Jabber/Google Talk, through Atom, RSS and iCal feeds, and email. Deadline understands input in natural language, so you can write something like, "call mom on Tuesday," and the web app will schedule it appropriately.

The Deadline UI is well-designed and not distracting, with edit and delete buttons readily accessible next to each item. Inspired by Twitter, to-do items have a 140 character cap to accomodate SMS support (which is forthcoming for Deadline, but not quite there yet). The 140 limitation doesn't have much practical effect, because date, time and location information can be submitted through brief natural language, no fancy syntax involved. There's an XML API, too, if you want to experiment with Deadline yourself.

Yes, your PDA, cellphone, BlackBerry, or whatever it is you carry around in your pocket probably came with a calendar and contact manager. And they probably suck. Pocket Informant doesn't.

This personal information management suite was originally designed as a complete replacement for the PIM applications that come with Windows Mobile. It's now available for iPhone and BlackBerry devices as well.

The Pocket Informant calendar is nothing short of awesome. It offers agenda, day, week, and month views that are quite frankly more useful than anything you'll find in Outlook or Google Calendar. And they just happen to fit beautifully on a small screen. You can easily see at a glance how much free and busy time you have in a day. And you can link appointments to contacts, set reminders, and show tasks from your To Do list in your calendar.

Pocket Informant's search utility also puts the built in Windows Mobile search function to shame. Results appear almost instantly, and you can find top level information like a contact's name or phone number, or results that are buried down a bit deeper like a name mentioned in a note attached to a calendar item from a year ago.

Pocket Informant for Windows Mobile costs $29.95. The BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod touch versions are each $20.

Mozilla has released version 0.9 of Sunbird, its calendar application. The Lightning calender extension for the Thunderbird email client has also been updated. There's a huge list of changes under the hood, but here are some of the most noticeable:

• Calendar views have been overhauled
• A progress indicator shows up when you're reloading a remote calendar
• Multi-day events now have visual indicators showing that they're connected
• You can now show the today pane in the tasks mode

Memory use has also been improved and the application is reportedly more stable. Lightning 0.9 is the last version designed for use with Thunderbird 2. Future development will focus on integrating the calendar extension with Thunderbird 3.

Sunbird and Lightning are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

[via Mozilla Links]