Friday, November 30, 2007

iCal2Viewty 0.1

Just created this page to share the iCal export script for LG Viewty phone. Not sure if it is useful to anyone else, but it does what I want it to do :-)

************ READ ME 1st ***************
THIS is NOT a 2-way sync you will lose your current phone calender.

Make sure you have taken a backup of your current events. You will need to clear the memory and it is always a good idea to have a copy:

Organiser > Settings > Backup calendar & to do > Calendar > Yes

*****************************************

It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial Share-Alike (v2) license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/deed.en_GB

Instructions

Main

1) First you need to make sure your LG Viewty is paired with your Mac with bluetooth. If you need help with this try the apple site:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=34744

2) Download the program

3) Clear the memory before running the program or you will end up with duplicate entries:

Organiser > Settings > Clear all > Yes

4) Run the program, which will end with the running of "Bluetooth File Exchange" to transfer to the phone.


Advanced Config.

By default the program only add events from the last month and into the next 3, ie, 4 months in total, however if you create a file called /tmp/ical2viewty.config you can override these settings if you have more or less events that fill the 100 event limit of the phone.

The ical2viewty.config file should contain only the following 4 lines :

<?
$months_history = 1;
$months_future = 3;
?>

If you want to have peek to see what it is doing the code can be found here - please excuse the very poor code in my parts - bad I know....

Thanks
-------------------------------------------

Thanks to Ben Barnett (http://menial.co.uk/) for great "iCalender File Parser" php function used by my program.


Known Limitations/Problems
-------------------------------------------

Lots, but here are the main ones.
  • This is not a Sync - It is one way only!!!!
  • Yearly everts are added always as Birthdays - Don't find many other uses for Yearly events so the script does not bother to parse them as anything else
  • Monthly events recurring x number of times doen't work too well - This is a problem with phone.
  • Alarms not working - again the phone has issues with the "common" format - This is a problem with phone
  • 100 items limit - This is a problem with phone

-------------------------------------------
To Do
-------------------------------------------

  • - Config file location
  • - Alarms

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Version History
-------------------------------------------

0.1 First Copy.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi there. Any chance of uploading the workflow / code that you used to make this app? I'd really like to edit it to only grab certain calenders.

Thanks. Dave (da5244@bris.ac.uk)

Pat said...

Hi the code is also on the site :-) (http://www.cm7.ch/ical2viewty/code.txt).

The way iCal organizes the calendars is a bit unorganized, hence I get them all. The first version I had used the publishing code from phpicalendar.net to get just one or two.

Pat

Robin said...

I just wanted to say many thanks for doing this - it's a little thing but it makes a big difference to Viewty usefulness and helps with my frustration at the general lack of communication between Mac and Viewty!

Anonymous said...

Hi - Thanks for doing this. As Robin says - It's a little thing with HUGH implications so a big thank you.

Just wondering, If I have multiple items in one day, it is only sending one of them rather then all. Any ideas how i can get them all to the phone???

Pat said...

@Greg:

I have not seen this only sending one item for a day in my testing... can you email me a screen shot of the day in ical or send me the example entries that don't work, so I can make some test and see if I can fix it.

As I say muti events in one day have worked in my tests, so need to see what you are doing.

Pat
ical2viewty@cm7.ch

Robin said...

re multi-events - (since I appear to be emailed with all comments!) - they work fine for me too. Greg - are you sure you are not missing the almost invisible down arrow at the bottom of the 'event detail box'? If you tap on that it should bring up the next event in that day ....