Rothemund

It took quite some while, but final it is there: the bidirectional synchronization between Google Calendar and Mozilla Thunderbird. I know, synchronization should be bidirectional by default, but lately the word synchronization was used with different meanings. However, I do not care anymore – it finally works!

I have tried it my own. WITH offline support!!! So, you can update your Google Calendar via Thunderbird and everything you change in Google Calendar will also show up in Thunderbird and can be displayed off-line (you have to choose “Work offline” from the “file” menu though). You can also make changes to Thunderbird and it will show up in Google Calendar after a while.

This made my day. I was waiting for this so long. 😉

The respective links:

• Provider Plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Google Calendar

It might have some bugs still, but so far it worked fine for me.

While adding a new feed to Google Reader a little window open and tells me that Google Gears would like to use this application. I accepted and suddenly the little green symbol for activating the offline modus in Google Reader appeared!

It seems to work. I did not change anything. OK, today there was one update for Linux, but I do not think it was do to this update of Gnome utils. But who knows. It is just weird because I can not understand, why suddenly the “thingy” works.

But on the other hand: Who cares? Google Gears finally works! 😉

Due to a comment by Jon on my last article on Google Gears, “Google Gears still not working for me on Ubuntu“, I gave this tool an other try on my FSC Amilo si1520 with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

It seems to work for Jon with Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). He mentioned, that he had installed libc6 and libstdc++5. I have checked and both files were installed already on my system. So these were not the problem. My next try was to deactivate all other Firefox add-ons. This was not a major success, as Google Gears still does not work. But at least now a pop-up opens, when I click on “Extras” -> “Google Gears Settings”.

Unfortunately I still can not change the settings. When I go to “Extras” -> “Add-ons” I can see “Google Gears” as a add-on, but the “Settings”-option is greyed-out.

Additionally the “Offline”-option in Google Reader does not show up in my account any more. This makes it quite difficult to use Google Gears for me at the moment. I don’t know. It was there a few days ago.

I guess the guys in Mountain View do not really like me, so I thought I migh just give up for now. 😉

Maybe once I have figured out my problem with my external hard drive (I think I will write a post about this too), I can make a back up of my data and then upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), where Google Gears seems to work. At least for Jon.

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story “Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)” to know more.