Geek 2.0

After being quite for some long weeks, I spent some time over the week-end to prepare release v0.30 of JSCalendarSync. You can download it now from SourceForge’s repository

We are now several dozen, within and outside Sun, to use JSCalendarSync on a daily basis, with no major problem.

This release introduces some changes and many bug fixes. I would encourage every users to download it to replace the existing version.

I would like to thanks all of you for your testing, suggestions and encouragements, also for your patience when helping me to debug this or that annoying issue.

So, what’s new in v0.30 ?

• the GUI now provides an option to sync or not the "Description" attribute from events. Many users complained about this attribute being synchronized while they are using it to store conf call access codes or otherwise confidential information. You can now ask JSCalendarSync to not synchronize this attribute.
• Event cancellation / modification notices are no longer sent by default. This request was very popular and caused many annoyances to all of us. By default, JSCalendarSync now asks Calendar Server to not send an email notice to event attendees when an event is modified / deleted on iCal.
  Should you want to enable this again, you’ll need to open a Terminal application, type "defaults write com.sun.luxembourg.cso.JSCalendarSync notifyAttendees -bool true" and restart JSCalendarSync
• And… last but not least…, a fellow Sun coworker started to implement support for recurring events. Preliminary code is in the CVS main branch. And we should expect some more announcements in the near future.

What’s fixed in v0.30 ?

• passwords and all text attributes are now URL-friendly, meaning that you can use special characters (like ?.:&%) in your passwords and event descriptions
• international character sets (german’s umlauts or french accents for example) are now correctly handled in booth directions
• many small bug fixes

Users upgrading from a previous version might have a small GUI glitch because of the way Window size and position are remembered from your last run. Should you encounter this small issue, open a Terminal application and type : ‘defaults delete com.sun.luxembourg.cso.JSCalendarSync "NSWindow Frame window"‘, then restart JSCalendarSync.

Finally, I would like to remind some of you that, the first time you run JSCalendarSync, you will be prompted by Mac OS X’s Synchronization Manager to authorize, or not, JSCalendarSync to synchronize with iCal. You must answer "Yes" to this question ! Failure to do so will prevent JSCalendarSync to work properly.

As usual, do not hesitate to report me any issue you might have or improvements you would like to see in future releaseS (yes : recurring events and attendees are high on my priority list 🙂

Happy synchonization !

Some of you have had some issues when starting JSCalendarSync. Some of these issues were due to bugs in my code, some other due to some kind of corruption in the local sync database on your mac.

I would like to thank all of you who reported errors and suggested enhancements, all the fixes and some enhancements are already ready in CVS and will be shipped in the next release.

In order to help to debug any issue, I often ask you to turn debugging on, here is a set of instructions to do this.

Turn JSCalendarSync’s debug mode on

• Ensure the application is not running,
• Open a Terminal and type
  defaults write com.sun.luxembourg.cso.JSCalendarSync debug -bool true
• Open the application again and use it normally (i.e. start a sync session – only modified events if possible to limit the amount of data writen in the log file)
• Be sure to quit JSCalendarSync to flush the log
• Send me by email the file located at
  Home Folder -> Library -> Logs -> JSCalendarSync.log
  (this file does not contain any sensitive data such as password, but it contains the adress of your calendar server and your username. You might want to strip this information out with a text editor before sending the file)

When the debugging mode is on, an additional menu item named "Debug" will appear at the right of the help menu. This menu contains useful entries like "Delete all events on calendar Server" and "Unregister client". Please be extra cautious when using these. You might loose all your data !

The other common problem reported to me is the error message "Can not start sync session" at application startup time.

How to avoid "Can not start sync session !" at startup ?

For most users, this message indicates a problem in the Sync Service registration database. Please execute the following steps :

• Ensure the application is not running,
• Turn debugging mode as per instructions above,
• Select the "Debug" menu item and then choose "Unregister client",
• Confirm the operation,
• Restart the application.

If you are still experiencing the problem, please contact me.

I posted the latest release of JSCalendarSync to SourceForge servers during the last week-end. This 0.25 release adds support for the “Location” and “Description” attributes of events.
As usual, feel free to download, and be careful when testing this tool, it might delete all your calendar’s events.