Hi,<div><br></div><div>I am Suryakant Gokhale a final year student of computer science at Bits-Pilani, India.I am very much interested in the project aiming to sync Calendar data from Thunderbird/Lightning to the Gnome-Panel Clock applet as I really needed it back then when I shifted to ubuntu.</div>
<div>And to work on a project which you yourself really desire is great fun. </div><div><br><br>I have always interested and been reading about this calendar export stuff in the community and have realized that already there many efforts in this direction.<br>
To name a few<br><br>1.) There is a thunderbird plugin called mirror evolution which basically copies all your changes in the lightning calendar to the evolution data server and hence events get displayed on the clock applet.<br>
but it has limitations that on clicking edit for an appointment evolution gets opened. there are workarounds but the whole thing becomes a mess.<br><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9656" target="_blank">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/9656</a><br>
<br>2.)Also there are quite a few plugins which provide two way syncing between google calendar and thunderbird <br><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631" target="_blank">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631</a><br>
<br>3.)lifehacker has an article on how to connect any client to google calendar.<br></div>
<div><a href="http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar" target="_blank">http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar</a><br><br><br><br>4.)This link is also a great treasure when it comes to thunderbird and the clock applet <br>
<a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-806472.html" target="_blank">http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-806472.html</a><br><br><br>Option no 1.) is simply too complex because it uses two clients to do the same thing and could be very confusing for new users whcih is not good for ubuntu. <br>
<br>Rest of the options are to synchronize one's online and offline lives as best as possible.<br><br>Summarizing all the information above I think it is essential for ubuntu to natively support Thunderbird/Lightning calendars in it's gnome-panel clock applet.<br>
<br>1.) Since Thunderbird has better sync support with google calendar. <br>2.) Thunderbird is present on almost all Operating systems so more users migrating to ubuntu will be benefited<br>2.)Since google has started providing a sync client from Microsoft Outlook to Thunderbird . Displaying Thunderbird events in clock essentially displays one's outlook ( corporate :) ) events too.<br>
</div><div><br>Also I have a few suggestions regarding the current UI of the calendar <br>1.)use of small icons to denote types of events <br>2.)May be a search field at the top <br>3.)May be we can use ubuntu's new official notification system notify-osd to display alerts for one's calendar <br>
4.) I Particularly like Rainlendar's Calendar may be we can borrow a feature or two :) mostly UI stuff <br></div><br>I am proficient in C and willing to extend my knowledge of Gtk+ which are going to help me in this project.
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I have made a few changes to the clock applet and included a tooltip to
show a Tasks due date and Description to familiarize myself with the
codebase.<br><br>Please find attached a patch for the same.<br><br>I would be absolutely delighted if given an opportunity to work for this project and make life a bit easy for millions of users and myself.<br><br><br>Yours Sincerely,<br>
Suryakant Gokhale <br>Birla Institute Of Science and Technology<br> <br><br><br><br> <br>