Comments on: Bringing Google Calendar to My Desktop

By: devan

devan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:22:04 +0000

You’re quite right—Lingon has undergone a significant change since my post. See my update above, near the discussion of the XML.

By: jan

jan — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:16:06 +0000

I’m using 10.5.2 with Lingon 2.0.2 and I don’t see the “Expert” tab anywhere - what am I doing wrong?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

By: chris

chris — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:01:26 +0000

go away completely? ugh also, the google-apps hosted calendars don’t seem to be functional with this method… you don’t get a ‘private xml url’ the url’s they pass out are only ‘public’ versions which will only work if your calendar is shared to all the world.

I do hope that they don’t deprecate cron…

By: devan

devan — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 12:29:12 +0000

Hi, Dennis,

I think the error you’re getting is caused by my failure to account for repeated events. See pizen’s comment above, where he adds parameters to the query string. Should work like a charm.

As for rolling curl into the script, I’ve tried both ways, and I still prefer to have curl run as a launchd agent.

When I have curl in the perl script, two things happen:

1. If the script fails (e.g., because I’m offline), my agenda doesn’t show up. This should not happen, as Byron points out above, but it does.

2. While the script is running, I can’t see any events. So, for about 10 seconds every 5 minutes, I’m in the dark. No big deal, but I like it the other way better.

All that said, getting curl in the script could look like this:
my @curlargs = ("/usr/bin/curl", "-s", "-f", "[URL string]", "-o", "/path/to/.gcalfeed.xml");

system(@curlargs) == 0 or die "system @curlargs failed: $?";

As usual, I’ve broken one of these lines artificially; there’s a line break between "-f", and "[URL string]" that you should remove.

By: Dennis Walker

Dennis Walker — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 06:33:50 +0000

Wow, this is not easy. Would it be possible to see a version of someone’s pl script that has the curl and Date::Format rolled in? It seems that putting the System curl call is definitely the way to go. It also seems that everything after “system” is supposed to in quotes. Currently I’m hung up on this error, “Use of uninitialized value in numeric le (

By: Desktop and Laptop Computers

Desktop and Laptop Computers — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 02:04:07 +0000

Desktop and Laptop Computers…

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…

By: ltj

ltj — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:12:50 +0000

it works, thanks a lot

By: devan

devan — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:46:25 +0000

Great work, pizen. I’ll try this later today. ltj, pizen’s solution should work for you… May take some tinkering with the script.

By: pizen

pizen — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:00:21 +0000

I added the following to the perl script
use Date::Format;

my $startmin = time2str("%Y-%m-%d", time); my $startmax = time2str("%Y-%m-%d", time+345600);
then I appended ?singleevents=true&start-min=$startmin&start-max=$startmax&orderby=starttime&sortorder=a to the GCal XML url.

There’s more detailed info at the Google Calendar Data API Reference.

By: devan

devan — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 11:48:37 +0000

Hi again, Jeff,

I think this is caused by repeated events. They have no element, so the script is breaking on them. I’m looking into repeat handling now, but it may be a while… Sorry.

Devan