Since I’ve made the switch from Thunderbird to Entourage 2008, one of my missing features is the ability to sync with Google calendar.

I tried using Plaxo, but they sync to your main Google calendar and not any others. This may work well if you only have one Google calendar to sync with, but that wasn’t my case.

I thought about some of the tools like Spanning Sync and gSync but Spanning says it doesn’t work right with Entourage and gSync doesn’t say anything. You’d think that since Entourage syncs with iCal, that it wouldn’t be that hard.

If you’ve upgraded to Thunderbrid 2.0 you can now run the Provider extension that will sync Google Calendar and Thunderbird running the calendar extension.

It’s very easy to setup thanks to bfish.xaedalus.net’s instructions. I tested it out this morning and it worked flawlessly. Ok, maybe one minor issue. It seems that it ‘automagically’ populated my Google username and it wasn’t correct. I had to switch it. But other than that, the directions are dead on and easy to follow.

I was excited to hear about Mozilla’s latest extension called Lightning. It is a calendar extension that is nicely integrated into Thunderbird.

Granted this is version 0.1, and there are a lot of bugs, but it is quite nice. A great start to a much needed Thunderbird addon.

One thing that bugged me though was the look. Just seemed like it could be cleaner. So I took a few minutes, dug though the extension and found some CSS that allowed me to give the calendars a nicer, more enjoyable, look and feel.

Judge for yourself:

Before