Tag Archive for 'development'

Developers Get Access to iCal Database

Published on January 24, 2008 0 Comments

iCal iconArs Technica is reporting on (what I think is) a pretty exciting event for OS X software development. Apple has provided software developers with access to the Calendar Store, the system that manages the database of events, todos, and alarms in OS X. This type of access has been possible for the Address Book since 10.2. For instance, you can associate a screen name in Adium with an Address Book entry, and information is populated automatically. Now that same type of interaction can happen between third-party applications and the Calendar database.

I am going to guess that this is going to have an immediately HUGE effect on GTD type applications. The Mac has already seen this market of software grow very quickly. Now these systems will be able to tie into the same database, a database that is also integrated into first-party Apple apps like iCal and Mail.

The area I’m very excited about is calendar synchronization. There are a few tools out already that synchronize online calendars with iCal. Spanning Sync and Plaxo will both sync Google Calendar to iCal, however these require periodic updates and dealing with duplicates can get messy and scary if you make the wrong move in resolving a conflict. Now, I hope we will see instant two-way synchronization that works completely behind the scenes. The Calendar Store access allows applications listen for changes in the Calendar database, and act on them immediately, so I believe that duplicates and other issues related to periodic syncing can be minimized, or in an app to app situation, completely eliminated.

One of the primary reasons I switched my day-to-day computer from Windows to Mac was for the cleanly integrated PIM applications, and I’m ecstatic to see continued and increasing support to make things work together even better.

Via: Ars Technica

ESWAT

Published on May 18, 2007 0 Comments

I’ve heard a lot about web frameworks, but I’ve never really looked at what they are. A post at Download Squad about ESWAT got me interested in the concept… it looks like exactly the type of thing I could use at this point of my personal web design development.

This framework is meant to remove the hassle of recreating the same folders, HTML tags, CSS rules, Photoshop guides, etc. for every new project, and help create grid-based layouts in Photoshop to boot. Once you get the ZIP archive it’s just drag and drop, then rip away. Sure, you could set up a system like this on your own, but I figured I share with you my version. Since I mostly work on small projects, this framework is geared towards front-end design and coding.

Hopefully this weekend I’ll dive into the setup and see what’s going on. Has anyone else had any experience with any particularly helpful web development frameworks?