[NTLK] Syncing Calendars

[Matthias Melcher]

On 13.08.2013, at 20:45, Morgan Aldridge <morgant at makkintosshu.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Noah Leon <moosefuel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks for the replies. I'll see what I can figure out in terms of a
>> manual workflow, but I would like to know, is it really difficult to write
>> code to sync between the newt and apple's sync services? I wish I were a
>> coder, but all I'm really good at is AppleScript.
> 
> It should be doable, but the biggest problem is the difference in data
> storage formats & fields between the Newton & Mac-side. Since many
> fields may have to be converted/truncated and/or put into different
> fields, it can be difficult to do consistently. Sync is notorious for
> this problem, in general. Add to that the fact that Apple's Sync
> Services lean more towards BlueTooth and such, we'd have to add
> protocols to the Newton (plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think
> Sync Services may be deprecated at this point).
> 
> nSync used to support much of this and few people tried to improve it,
> but I don't think they ever got it to a point where they felt it was
> worth pursuing. And, that was quite a number of years ago.

IMHO it is best to support public cloud format like CalDav. Since they are public, they don't go away any time soon. Linux servers can be configured to provide calendar services this way, and most liely for many years to come. Any other platform, (even including Apple Calendar) can be configured to sync with these as well.

So as long as you are online in some form, your Mac, Windows, Linux, and Newton calendars would stay in sync.

As for data security, yes, you need to store the data with a provider you trust. And of course they are not encrypted (I heard that encrypted data is seen as treason in some countries?). However, using DynDNS, you can be your own provider with a tiny Linux server (Raspberry Pi is the size of a cigarette box) and a DSL connections.

 - Matthias