[KLUG Members] Re: Zaurus - Now who's oversight was this? -- no sir, your logic is dead wrong ...

[Adam Tauno Williams]

>>Well, there is Evolution, GNOME Card, ical (the X program not the ical
>>protocol), etc...  It is a inefficient, stupid, and short sighted
>>arrangement.
>>With Win32 you just sync with Outlook or at least something that mimics it
>>clean, straight forward.
>Huh???  No sir I totally _disagree_.  Your logic is _dead_wrong_ and
>I'll tell you why.
>Linux itself has _unified_ Palm conduit interfaces c/o the Pilot
>program.  And using them, Gnome then has an _unified_ set of application
>conduit interfaces for _all_ Gnome applications.  Evolution uses the
>_same_ ones that Evolution, Gnome Calendar and others use -- it's up to
>you which one you want to use, enable/disable, etc...

No, Linux does not have a unified interface.  GNOME provides gpilot,  KDE apps
may have something else,  there are several "pilotd"s floating about, not to
mention various java implementations.  And gpilotd (probably the dominate one)
only supports Palm's, adding others is non-trivial (I've looked at the code).

>Very, very, very sweet, if you have a Palm device (any Palm device).

I do, and it works well.

>[ In fact, current Zaurus efforts "piggy-back" on those most excellent
>Palm conduits ]

Unfortunately it isn't an issue so much of the conduits as it is communicating
and identifiying the specific device.

>Windows has _no_equivalent_ unified interface.  Microsoft has its own
>Outlook conduits and it does _not_ share them with 3rd party
>applications.  It's either Outlook or nothing.

Of course is is Outlook or nothing... you mean there are still other
mail/task/calendar clients for windows? :)

>Put simply, Sharp has only themselves to blame for not creating the
>conduits.  For 1/5th the effort it took them to do it for Outlook, they
>should have also created them for Linux.  But instead they left it as an
>exercise for the Linux community.  As such the device's poor support has
>resulted.

Evolution supplies it's own conduits, these are not shared with other
applications.  And the underlying device support isn't trivial.

>>If Linux sported a simple light weight icap/ical server than the Zaurus
>>could sync to that, evolution could use it as a backend, etc....  If someone 
>>came up with something that worked (and a skeleton icap server exists under 
>>GPL) the adoption rate would be like a forest fire.
>Your point there has _nothing_ to do with PDAs.  I agree with your
>point, but it is not applicable in this situation.

No, but the Zaurus isn't really a PDA (i.e. non-networked and brain dead), it is
a handheld PC and is networkable.  There doesn't really need to be any
PC/Handheld distinction,  they can both sync to a server via a network.

>BTW, iCal is really a client-side sharing mechanism (even though it is
>centrally stored).  That is, it's half-@$$es.  

Yep, that argument is made alot.  But even Apple got it to work.  The transport
is really irrelevant, having a server that knows what to do with iCal data is
what matters.  I believe Apple is using DAV, as is Mozilla.  Outlook/Exchange
use DCE but unfortunately pack everything in there stupid TNEF format instead of
using something like iCAL.  Supporting DAV, DCE, whatever on Linux has been SO
done, so no matter what is selected as a transport I don't think it much matters.

>Outlook uses incompatible
>proprietary mechanisms to achieve the same results.

But even Outlook and Palm Desktop support iCal.