I work at an office. I also work from home. I also work when I’m out and about (sometimes). Oh yes, sometimes I work on a PC, sometimes a Mac. So what do I do about my calendar? Well, Google Calendar is a pretty good solution in many respects. I can get to the information from anywhere I can get an internet connection.

Therein lies the rub. If I can’t get a connection then I’ve got no idea where I’m going or who I’m supposed to be meeting. Google Calendar still goes offline and weird/unusable sometimes, as well: this Monday it displayed blank screens and I couldn’t add or change events, as memory serves. Experience has taught me to print out my appointments for the day ahead of time and often to double-enter appointments into different clients. Not ideal, you’ll agree.

But I’m the bearer of good news, I hope. Calgoo is a Java desktop product that can aggregate and synchronise my burgeoning list of calendars. Currently, it can deal with Outlook, iCal (viz. Apple Calendar and many online calendars) and Google Calendar. All of them - potentially - on different machines. Since today, it’s in open beta test.

It works. And for me, that’s the really big news. I’ve tried lots of different ways to get information back and forth from Google to Outlook to Calendar before now - as well as every other web calendar available. They have all been painful. And they didn’t work properly.

So.. not very fancy (it’s a bit ugly, to be honest). Not very Web 2.0 in some senses (no AJAX, no RUBY). It’s quite big (15MB download; 95MB in memory). But it is clever - and there’s Windows, Mac & Linux varieties available. I haven’t yet explored the possibilities for calendar publishing and sharing, but put it this way: I haven’t been able to do that properly ever, using ‘best of class’ software from every major vendor because of data incompatibility issues. WOOHOO!

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