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Apple iCal for Windows? Linux?

Every wish you could access or create Apple iCal calendars on other machines? You can! Mozilla has the Calendar project going on. “We are striving to build a cross-platform fully standards based calendar client based on the open iCal standard.”- Mozilla What it does is adds a calendar app to Mozilla products. This app then can read and create .ics files, or otherwise know as iCal files. I have iCal calendars published on a WebDAV server (Spymac) and I was able to subscribe to them in the Mozilla Calendar. Everything showed up great! One thing to keep in mind is the Mozilla Calendar is in beta so bugs are there and it doesn’t look as slick as FireFox’s interface. However there is an entire calendar, events, alarms and more available. All completely compatible with Apple’s iCal and usable on Mac, Windows and Linux running Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird or Netscape. Oh and it’s free!

Download/Install Now.


23 Responses

  1. Untill then the much older Linux ical is working again.

    The two aren’t related.
    ical becouse at the time a bunch of Linux apps were i… (i for independent, x for X11, K for KDE and G for Gnome. the vareous GUI systems. However I and X are redundent as all the Linux GUIs are X11)

    Every sense the iMac everything apple did was i this and i that.

    And there is a service called ical. Internet calander.

    Still it’s nice having more than one ical for Linux just as it is probably nice having more than one ical on Mac (someone ported the older Linux ical to the Mac platform).

  2. Eivind says:

    This is cool, Iยดll try this out on my girlfriends new notebook (pc)

  3. Tim says:

    pretty cool!

  4. Bulb says:

    Nah…!

    Such a dreamz app!

  5. Andy D says:

    I have looked at the mozilla stuff and it’s cool, but I want to know is the iCal software available for Windows, not other progs that support but an actuall iCal prog?

  6. Jack says:

    how do I sync my Mozilla calendar with my ipod ?

  7. Thomas says:

    Andy – iCal, the program, is Apple only.

    Jack – You’d probably have to do this manually by dragging the calendar file onto your iPod. However, I’d do some searching on VersionTrackker or someplace that may be able to good suggestions.

  8. Liz says:

    does this sync with apple iPhone?

  9. Thomas says:

    I don’t have an iPhone, so I’m no help there Liz.

  10. Micah says:

    Great! Thank you very much. I was wondering where that project had gone. The new Mozilla site is such a pain… Many thanks, many thanks! >:3

  11. Bru says:

    The mozilla calendar project page is now at:
    It includes your choice of either Sunbird standalone calendar, or Lightning calendar add-on component for Thunderbird email users. Both calendar products are in sync at ver 0.9 with basically same capabilities. Choice depends on if you wish Sunbird standalone calendar (or use a non-thunderbird email), or pick Lightening if you already use Thunderbird email. (I know, bizarre names – they got them backwards – seems like the thunderbird add-on would be named sunbird…). I am about to give sunbird standalone a try myself.

  12. Howard says:

    I was wondering will sunbird connect to a private CalDav server running on Leopard Server? If so is their a configuration document

    Thanks

  13. Jose says:

    Lightning falls short of iCal as it lacks certain features such as… a scrolling time line indicating the current time time over the events in your calendar. It only shows you one month in the left hand column, there is so much space in this column if you close the to do window, why doesn’t lightning/sunbird allow for other months to be shown as in iCal. It gives you such a good overview while in weekly view in the main window. The event boxes in the calendar itself are narrower and the titles only use on line. In iCal you can title an event with more than one line so more info about the event title is viewable immediately. In lighntinh/sunbird only one line is used for the title, most of which is cut out by the narrowness of the event box. Have any Mozilla developers picked up on this?

  14. Mike says:

    You can try WorkWeek 2.0 (workweek2.com). It’s one of the best iCal clones for windows.

  15. Denise says:

    I’ve never used Mac anything. My boss has iCal and wants me to be able to access his iCal and possibly have one of my own on my Win XP computer. I don’t know enough about Mozilla calendars, but wonder if Sunbird would address this issue. If he has created an iCal on his Mac, is it possible for me to have an iCal which will allow him to send appts to me and vice versa? Is that even possible? Thanks for any help.

  16. Bruce says:

    Denise,
    The theory is that there is an intermediary data storage format used by iCal which is compatible with that used by Sunbird, so that you could export his data from iCal and import into your Sunbird to have the calendars become synchronized. The data files should be ones ending in extension .ics
    I have been meaning to experiment with this myself but have not gotten around to it. (it’d be good for me to see if the theory holds up in practice).
    (BTW, I am not a developer for either, just an independent tech support person.)
    As I look back at your question, I am sure it is possible, but I have not yet enough experience to tell you the exact detail steps for the best way to set this up.
    I would love to find out a best-practice on this. And will probably do some more research on it.
    So take some heart from this, even if I have not given a final anser. ๐Ÿ˜‰

  17. Denise says:

    Thanks Bruce. When I find more time, I’ll look into this a little more. I appreciate your response and if you do find the final answer, please do post it on here!! ๐Ÿ™‚

  18. Jonathan says:

    Denise,

    You can use Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Google Calendar Sync extension on PC to sync the calendar with your boss’s mac (iCal/Google Calendar plugin on Mac). We do this and it works without hassle. Syncs up on iPhone also (Mac side).

    • billtech66 says:

      I did try that. to use google calendar to get data from Mac iCal to android phone.

      I failed to transfer all data to google calendar, without a lot of hoops to jump through.

      then when I did get most of the data transferred it caused over 7,200 duplicates to appear on my phone.

      I had to delete all data and start over, no way to remove duplicates.

      Then, when I deleted google calendar after making a backup file of Google calendar, I was not able to transfer any data to google again.

      But worse: the backup file completely failed to reload into google calendar.

      I had a tech take over my computer and he was puzzled too, and could not figure out how or why Google calendar would NOT load it’s OWN backup file.

      Based on this and prior troubles, I do not trust google for anything.

  19. Alex says:

    I tried the latest version of WorkWeek 2 and it almost fully suited my requests. There is actully no real CalDav in it but authors saying that they are working on it. And beside I really like it’s design.

  20. Kim says:

    Hi;
    Yup, would really like to have windows users sync with our private ical servers through sunbird.
    Is this possible and is there a doc outlining the steps?
    Thanks!

  21. Nine A. says:

    Aww man, I just realized the date on your post… it was almost like a decade ago. I checked out Mozilla and too bad they didn’t pursue a better version of the plug-in. I can’t find a decent link. Tsk tsk.

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