Google Calendar Syncing Is Here!

Well despite my earlier post saying that it was not possible, I have
got Google Calendar sync working on the J720.

Thanks go to Jake from the forums on hpcfactor.com who helped with
much of the testing and experimenting to get this working.

First you need an account with goosync.com, which unfortunately is not
free, but is the only way I know to get this to work. Fortunately for
me I already had an account.

Make sure you have Redgear and TTSync installed (available from the
repository on this blog). You will will want to run TTSync in PPC
portrait mode from the Redgear settings icon in the titlebar. This
renders the TTSync GUI in a more readable way, although it will still
be rough around the edges as is often the case when trying to run
Pocket PC software on the Handheld PC.

The important thing is that is usable. Now, if you already have a
device profile set up at the Goosync end, delete it and set up a new
one. Any device profile seems to work. You may want to go into
Goosync's calendar settings as well, as it seems to set a default
reminder for each appointment. I switched this off.


The TTSync program is not set up to sync with Google out of the box,
so you will need to edit the config.ini file in the TTSync program
folder. I have uploaded my config.ini file to the repository, so you
can just overwrite the file with that if you don't want to put in the
server settings yourself or just have a look to see how I've done it.

Now you can start TTSync. Go into the settings and put in your Goosync
username and password. Make sure you click in the Server setting box
and make sure Goosync is selected. Tap okay.

Now tap the large "Calendar" button down the bottom of the TTSync
screen. Make sure the "Sync mode" is set to Server. When you're ready
hit "Sync".

The screen should take some time sending and receiving, and if
everything works you should see the "completed" message in the
screencap above. Tap "Exit" to go back to the main TTSync screen.

From now on you should be able to just use the "Sync All" option at the
top of the screen every time you sync.

IMPORTANT: Do not do what I was doing wrong throughout most of my
testing and click the Redgear X button to close the apllication. If
you do this it will not save your settings and syncing will not work
after. Instead ALWAYS exit by selecting "Options" then "Exit".

That's it. It only works one way: from Google to the Jornada, so
essentially the calendar is read only. Any appointments made on the
handheld will not sync back to Google. Two-way synchronisation is
possible but it just creates duplicates of your appointments and I
don't recommend it.

Also note that I have so far not been able to get All Day events to
synchronise correctly. Thney appear as midnight to 23:59 timed events.
However I can live with that.

The other screencap above shows a test appointment I made on Google
Calendar and successfully synced to my Jornada.

It is also possible to edit the config.ini file to sync GMail contacts
as well although I have left this out as it only syncs names and
telephone numbers, not email addresses,which is of no use to me.

Quite a complicated process, but well worth it I think. I hope someone
else finds this helpful.

UPDATE: Jake from hpcfactor.com added this tip, "disabling automatic reminders in Pocket Outlook will also take away the default appt reminder in a GooSync sync".

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

New Software Repository

Trawling the web for old legacy software has certainly kept me
occupied for the last few weeks. It seems that some software titles
are just dead and buried and will probably never see the light of day
again.

To make things easier for any new HPC owners that land on this blog, I
thought I would put together a little repository of some of the best
and most useful (and often hard to find) applications for the
platform.

They are either freeware or trial versions, so I should not be
stepping on any toes by putting them up here. Needless to say, if you
need to get some of the software registered, then you should try the
official sources first, but if the software has been abandoned by it's
writers then you might need to be a little more (ahem) creative!

I have included nPOPuk, which is still supported by it's developers
and seems to be the only email client worth installing. Many of the
other clients do not support SSL, which means you cannot use it with
modern email servers like GMail etc. Best of all, it's free!

There is also Opera Mobile 8.65 (trial) but make sure you install
Redgear first. Redgear allows you to run software designed for later
Windows CE devices on the Jornada.

Opera is probably your best option for web browsing, but to be honest;
that ain't saying much. Web browsing on the J720 is painful at best:
there doesn't seem to be enough memory, modern website security seems
to always fail, and the machine has locked up completely on me on
numerous occasions while trying to browse. However, a computer needs
web capability doesn't it? Well this is as good as it gets.

Resco did some pretty decent software back in the day, and here we
have two fine examples. The first is Resco File Explorer which is much
easier to use than the built-in explorer, has loads of functions, and
has an FTP plug-in. The FTP plug-in has proven to be very useful, but
more on that in a future post. There is the also excellent Total
Commander for the same sort of thing, but I just prefer Resco's app.

The second Resco app is Photo Viewer, which allows basic conversion
and editing of photos as well as viewing. Not only that, but it has a
screen capture function which is useful for me when posting screencaps
here.

Resco Explorer has a registry editor plug-in, but I prefer this one:
PHM Registry Editor. This is useful for tweaking the system, but more
on that later as well.

CE Agenda, is a very nice PIM application, but so far, I have had
little success syncing my google calendar items, so it's not very
useful to me at the moment.

Finally, FrotzCE is for playing Infocom style text adventures and I've
had lots of fun with this already. Great on a device with a keyboard
like this. Takes me back to yesteryear.

Well that's all for now. Hope this has been useful.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720

Don't pin any hopes on getting google calendar sync to work...

I have been trying to get this to work for some time now.

You see, I don't have Outlook installed on my PC: I use Google
services for just about everything. Anyhow, I resent having to dock
the Jornada and sync with my PC. I have a wireless card in the
handheld, so shouldn't I be able to do this over-the-air?

Well, as is often the case, the HPC predates google's sync services
and any software I could find requires a higher version of the OS and
.net CF 2.0. I could get around the versioning problem using tools
such as "executability check" but not the .net CF requirement. There
is absolutely no way to install it on this machine. You can install
.net CF 1.0, but this is not compatible with any of those apps.












The closest I have come to getting google sync to work is by
installing an old Pocket PC shareware application called "TTSync". It
will run if you have the Redgear utility installed. However, as you
can see from the picture, it doesn't run very well.

Nevertheless, I tried ediing the .ini file in the TTSync folder with
the the server details for Goosync.com (where I have registered an
account) and eventually I had success. The sync process seemed to work
and I had my google calendar appointments and contacts appearing in
Pocket Outlook.

Sadly, this only seems to work once, and then I have to delete my
device profile on goosync and re-add it for the sync to work again,
and when it does work for subsequent tries, it duplicates all the
data.

Therefore I have given up for the time being, but at least the above
shows that it is at least technically possible.

Sent from my HP Jornada 720