Without Standards, the World Falls Down

This was meant to be a happy post. Unfortunately OggSync gets to bear the brunt of my frustrations over standards and portability. But first some background:

I run a pretty busy schedule – to give you an idea of what that means in real terms I have 12 separate calendars – my manufacturing business alone has half a dozen calendars I need to keep an eye on (marketing, production, board stuff and operations). Add in my personal calendar and that of my wife, the calendar feeds from both myself and my wife generated by my favorite little web app of all time, TripIt, school term dates and the like and you see that my calendar feed gets kind of busy.

Add to this the fact that I’m travelling more and more (half a dozen international trips before May) and have to work mobile and you have a recipe for disaster. Until now I’ve made do with the single calendar sync that Google provides for in its Google cal to win mobile sync. That’s fine… until I need to check on the time for a flight that is trapped within TripIt.

Roll up my lifesaver, OggSync. OggSync provides a lovely little synchronization service that allows users of the pro version to sync multiple calendars with multiple clients, both desktop and mobile. It’s a full, two-way synchronization and backup application that also performs these tasks on contact data.

Or so I thought….

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Sydney, looking at eight or so Google calendars that have become almost completely useless. You see it happened like this…

I installed OggSync and set it up and was stoked to see all the events from my different calendars appear on my Windows Mobile device. So far so good… Yesterday however I flew to Sydney which is in a different timezone from home. I turned my device on at the airport and saw that Windows Mobile, as it’s designed to do, picked up the new timezone from the mobile carrier I was roaming on.

OggSync sprang into life and synchronized all my events… but… Unfortunately OggSync doesn’t know that Windows Mobile changed my timezones – so every single event in every single calendar I synch now appears two hours early – great if you’re anally retentive, terrible if you’re busy.

OggSync were really supportive, I need to point out this isn’t a failing of theirs per se, they told me it was a new issue with the latest version of WinMob and that they’d help me restore from backup once I got back to my home timezone – but this isn’t really the issue. Fundamentally this is an example of why using a third party to integrate different applications is a dangerous and fraught thing. Roll on open standards and open data…