Auto-magically Syncing Gmail Contacts and GCalendar with Mozilla Suite

I've really become a fan of Gmail since opening an account a few months ago. Initially, I opened the account just because I wasn't sure what internet service provider I would have when I moved and wanted to make sure that whatever e-mail provider I used would work seamlessly with Thunderbird. I'm keeping and using it increasingly, though, because of the free IMAP access and the ease of archiving my e-mail there. This means less data to store offline for me. I have yet to explore all the possibilities of Gmail and other Google applications, but I do tend to agree with the view of a number of folks out there in the blogosphere and tech world that online applications are increasingly the way to go. The portable applications I've described in previous posts are a really important step in the right direction, and of course there is not yet (quite) enough variety and horsepower of online applications to support all the different things we need to do with computers. In addition, I am still deeply reluctant to commit all my personal data to online services that could one day shut down or start charging fees even though they're free now. I really would like most of my data to live online with go-anywhere access, but yet still be sure that it's available to me offline in formats that don't require proprietary applications to work with. The existence of a couple nice synchronizing tools to make Mozilla suite applications like Thunderbird and Sunbird work and play together better with Gmail and Google Calendar are, in my mind, another terrific step in that direction.

I don't use Gmail online all that much because I prefer to have easy access to my Thunderbird address book, and I don't want to add contacts in Gmail that I then can't find from Thunderbird. The Zindus extension for Thunderbird solves this problem by automatically performing two-way synchronizing of your contacts with Gmail. Add someone to your Thunderbird address book, and Zindus will automatically add that information to your Gmail contacts list. Add a Gmail contact while you're away from Thunderbird and the next time Zindus performs a synch, it adds it to your address book. Of course, if you use multiple installations of Thunderbird (I have one on my flash drive that I use in Window$ computers and another copy on my Linux laptop), this is an easy way to synchronize those too! Just install Zindus on all your copies of Thunderbird and you will have access to all your contacts everywhere. It's very easy to install and set up Zindus, as with most extensions, but the only tricky bit is that Google mail can't handle duplicate e-mail addresses, so you will have to resolve those during the initial synchronization process. Basically, you just download the extension somewhere you can easily find it, go to Tools, Add-Ons in Thunderbird and click Install, browse to where you put the file, and click on it. Go ahead and let Thunderbird install Zindus and then restart T-Bird. Go to Tools again and you will see that there is now an entry for Zindus. Click on that and a new box will open where you need to pick Google and then enter your Gmail address and password. After the server test, you can click on over to the next tab to set your preferences and run the first synchronization. If you have any duplicate e-mail addresses, either within Thunderbird or between T-Bird and Google, the synchronization will fail but Zindus will tell you exactly where the duplicates are so you can fix the problems. Unfortunately, this is a one-at-a-time deal where you keep attempting to synch and each time Zindus finds a duplicate you have to fix it and start over. For me, though, this didn't take that long as only two duplicates were found. Your results will vary, naturally. Personally, I found the frequency of synchronizing to be unacceptable in the default setup. In the process of testing what happened when I added a new contact in Thunderbird, I found that it definitely did not show up right away in Gmail. The documentation pages for Zindus explained why: synchronization isn't an ongoing process, but rather is an event that takes place at set times that Zindus installs some default values for. When I checked the default values, they were set at one hour after opening Thunderbird and then every 12 hours thereafter. Uh... yeah, that's crazy. I'm not really sure why the defaults were set at such huge values since the actual auto-syncing is not that big a deal. You hardly know when it happens. Fortunately, if you are so inclined, it's not at all difficult to fix this. In Thunderbird, you go to Tools, Options and click on the Advanced tab. There, you click on the Config. Editor button. A big long list appears, which might look a little scary to those who don't do this kind of thing too often. All the entries are alphabetical and you are looking for the one named extensions.zindus.system.as_timer_delay_on_start, so just scroll down to it. You will see a value in the right-hand column, which is 3600. The value is in seconds, so the way we interpret this entry is that the timer to perform a synchronization after Thunderbird starts is set to 3600 seconds, or 60 minutes. Just right click on that entry, pick Modify and change the value to some more reasonable value. I picked 300 seconds because it never, ever takes Thunderbird more than five minutes to download my mail and that way it won't be trying to sync at the same time, in case that's an issue. The other relevant entry is extensions.zindus.system.as_timer_delay_on_repeat, which should be just above the other one. This value controls how often Zindus repeats the auto sync, after the first one following startup that we just set. By default, this one is set to 43200 seconds, or twelve hours! I don't know about you, but I never have my e-mail program open for twelve continuous hours. Right-click on that entry, pick Modify and enter a more reasonable value, in seconds, for how often you'd like Zindus to sync your contacts. I put in 1800 so that it will check every half hour. You will have to restart Thunderbird for the changes to take effect. If you do add a contact and want to make sure it gets added to Gmail right away, you can always access Zindus from the tools menu and click Sync Now. It only takes a couple seconds. I found that importing my Thunderbird contacts worked pretty well, except that there were a couple "mystery" entries that showed up in Google under a phone number because I had not set a "display name" in Thunderbird. I just edited those entries to add display names and they were fine.

I hadn't bothered to set up Google Calendar or work with that at all because I was already using Mozilla Sunbird as my calendaring application. I certainly didn't want to go to the bother of maintaining two separate calendars, but there have been times when it would have been nice to have access to my Sunbird calendar when I couldn't use my flash drive or just didn't feel like getting up to fetch it. ;-) Google Calendar actually supports syncing with a number of different programs, including Micro$oft Outlook, but I'm not going to go into those. There's a good post on the Lifehacker blog that gives the basics of syncing between Google Calendar and various programs. The relevant add-on for syncing Google Calendar with either Sunbird or the Lightning calendar extension for Thunderbird is, somewhat unimaginatively, called Provider for Google Calendar. Just like Zindus, you download the add-on someplace you'll be able to find it easily, then go to Tools, Add-Ons in your Sunbird/Thunderbird menu, click Install, browse to the correct file, and install it. The rest of the setup is a bit trickier and the instructions on Lifehacker didn't really explain how to get your events out of an existing Sunbird/Thunderbird calendar and into GCal, so I will try to walk you through my solution for that. After restarting, go to File, New Calendar in Sunbird or File, New, Calendar in Thunderbird. In the New Calendar wizard, choose "On the Network" and in the next box click the button for Google Calendar. Here's where it gets just a little tricky... you need to sign into your Google Calendar in your web browser and look in the left-hand column for the box labeled "My Calendars." Just to the right of the your username in that box (or the calendar you want to use if you have more than one) is a little drop-down arrow button, and in the box that pops up, select "Calendar Settings." Click on the Calendar Details tab and scroll all the way down to the bottom, where the section says "Private Address." Click the button that says XML. A box will pop up with a long web address in it and you need to copy that. Then paste it into the box in the Thunderbird/Sunbird setup screen that says "Location:". Click "Continue" and in the next screen, provide your username and password for Google Calendar. That's it for the setup in Sunbird/Thunderbird, but now you will have two different calendars if you've been using the program on an ongoing basis. I had no problems exporting my existing entries by going to File, Export Calendar in Sunbird. You have to pick the name of your current calendar, and then in the save box that pops up, just browse to someplace convenient where you'll be able to find your file and change the file type (in the Save As Type pulldown box at the bottom) to iCalendar. Theoretically, you could import this file into Google Calendar, but I wasn't able to do that successfully because it just generated error messages when I tried. So instead, I imported it from within Sunbird into the new calendar I just made. To do this, just go to File, Import and in the box that pops up, browse to the .ics file you just made, click on it, and then click Open. In the next screen, highlight the new calendar you want to import your entries into and click OK. When I did this, it still threw up some error messages, but all the calendar entries were successfully imported. Tasks were not successfully imported, and I suspect that these were the cause of the error messages I was getting. Fortunately, I don't use Sunbird for task management anymore, although I had some old tasks in there from when I was experimenting with that. If you do use Sunbird for task management, that's something you will want to consider. Once you get your old calendar information imported into the new calendar in Sunbird/Thunderbird, it should show up in your online Google calendar almost right away, after a refresh. The syncing seems to be virtually simultaneous and requires no intervention from the user.

One other little piece of open source goodness I will offer you in this post is a really good, cross-platform movie cataloging application. Griffith (yes, named for the director D.W. Griffith) is a free and open-source application that catalogs movies. That's all it does, but it's one of those programs that just does one thing very well. I've only installed it on Window$ Vista thus far, since that's the computer that handles most of my media applications, so I can't speak to how well it runs on Linux, much less Apple. However, I have found it to be very stable and fast on Vista, and entered about 500 titles into it in just a few hours. The program pulls its information from popular online movie and DVD databases like imdb.com and moviefone. Multiple languages are also supported, with a selection of French, German, Spanish, Polish, and other websites to choose from. All you do is type in the name or partial name of your movie into the search box. Griffith gives you a list of matching titles drawn from the selected website and you pick the matching movie. Griffith pulls up the information into a selection screen initially so that you can either go ahead and add it if it's the right one, or search again if it's not the right film. Using the imdb site works great for films, but for TV series, it's better to use the online DVD store website like DVDEmpire. Griffith pulls a lot of information into your collection database, including cast, ploy synopsis, movie poster, and even the user rating from the website. It allows you to mark which movies you've watched and has a feature for recommending an unwatched movie for you. It also has a function for tracking loaned movies. Griffith isn't perfect by any means, especially with regards to how it handles TV shows, but it's definitely the best and easiest free, open-source, cross-platform solution I've seen for cataloging DVDs.