Desktop Calendar on Google Calendar + Rainlendar

Found that on Habré there is still no article about the powerful desktop calendar Rainlendar. I make up for this unfortunate omission.

A bit of theory

According to the canons of GTD, the calendar is designed to store rough terrain - events scheduled for a clear time, or those that are known in advance (for example, holidays). And we will deal with them - todo-managers lately, and so it was divorced nemerye number.

What did I want from the calendar

• so that he was always with me - at home, at work, on a bench in the park, in transport, in bed at three in the morning
• never to worry about syncing
• to be beautiful and sexy
• oh yeah, and more comfortable, ergonomic and intuitive

Materiel

• Google calendar For what I love gkal - he knows how to send sms with reminders. Very convenient, besides, it works on any mobile phone. And, of course, there is a mobile interface - so the calendar from Google is available always and everywhere. Another thing is that it is not very convenient to keep it open all the time, so we take ...
• Rainlendar is an incredibly beautiful, convenient and unobtrusive desktop calendar for Windows / Linux. Skin Black Chromophore in my favorite Luna Element Black looks like a native. Pro-version of Rainlendar can communicate directly with GCal, but it’s crooked, and we don’t need it, because there is ...
• GCALdaemon is a utility for synchronizing Google Calendar with local files. In general, she is able to do a lot of things - for example, to check google post. Open-source, Java, cross-platform.

Customization

First of all, Google Calendar needs to separate events by separate calendars - at least because they are displayed in different colors. And in Rainlendar there will be different icons (as a bonus, Rainlendar can show the age of the birthday boy - more on that later). I have this “Personal”, “Projects”, “Finance”, “Holidays”, and “Birthdays”.

Particularly lazy ordering events is optional. Do you even need a calendar?

Next, install GCALdaemon. In the settings, open the tab “HTTP synchronizer”, click “Google account”, enter the login / password. Go to “File synchronizer”, put a tick on “Enable” (the top one), then click on New to add our calendars from Google. Each calendar will be saved in a separate file (I have default.ics, projects.ics, finances.ics, holidays.ics, birthdays.ics) - these files are conveniently put in one folder (I have f: \ rainlendar)
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Save and close the settings, go to Start - Programs - GCALdaemon - Service - Install - this installs the synchronizer to the services. We start the service and - voila - we observe files merged with GCal.

Now - the most interesting. Open the settings Rainlendar, tab "Calendars", then "Add" - "iCalendar format" - specify our files. After that, in the calendar settings, select “Monitor changes” - “yes” (this is so that Rainlendar picked up synchronized calendars) and select the appropriate “Visual category”. For events of the “Birthdays” category, the number of years from the beginning of the event will be reported (I promised) - very convenient. Of course, for this you need to correctly specify the year of birth of the birthday.

Save the settings. Now in Rainlendar there are events from your Google Maps. We are happy.

In action

GCALdaemon establishes two-way synchronization of your events - this means that if you change something in Rainlendar, Google will pick up the changes, and vice versa.

If there are two cars - at work and at home - in this way we synchronize both. Just to have access to Google Calendar.

Macovods can just as well synchronize iCal, so the problem of “Mac at home, at work Windows” disappears. I have here at work Ubuntu.

Here it is. I hope this helps you to become more organized, not to forget about birthdays and always stay on the ridge. Good luck!