CD cataloging and solution for exporting Outlook calendar data to iCal.
This week I have a lot of reader feedback to deal with. First up is a recommendation from longtime reader Gar Nelson regarding my recent quest for a program that would catalog and manage my collection of data CDs.
Gar suggested Readerware, and while it doesn’t specifically address cataloging data disks, it can catalog all sorts of media, and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Palm.
What amused me was when I went to check out the product on the Readerwear site I found an offer that is a blast from the past: A free CueCat!
Those of you who didn’t fry your brains during the Internet Bubble may remember this oddly packaged device. The CueCat is a USB- or PS/2-based bar-code reader developed by the now-defunct Digital Convergence Corporation in the shape of a stylized cat — the obvious choice of styling for a bar-code reader if you happen to be, say, a worshipper of the ancient Egyptian cat-goddess Bast.
Starting in 2000 Digital Convergence distributed tens of thousands of these devices to consumers in concert with a huge marketing campaign to get magazines and retailers to append bar codes in printed material that the Cat could read. I don’t have space to go into the flawed business model, the hacking of the CueCat devices, and the mass exposure of consumer data (see the Wikipedia entry for the whole story) but the result, unsurprisingly, was that Digital Convergence went belly up in 2005.
Anyway, the CueCat is indeed free, but only with the purchase of one of the Readerware bundles, which start at $85. I have yet to take a serious look at this software, so if you have, let me know your thoughts.
Another topic that generated a remarkable amount of feedback was my recent Gearhead column on trying to automate the export of calendar data from Outlook to iCal.
Of all the Gearhead columns from the past year this one generated the most mail! From this I would guess that things to do with Outlook and Exchange feature very heavily in your lives — perhaps more so than I would have guessed. So, tell me: What are your biggest issues with Outlook? What problems are you trying to solve?
My problem seems to have a number of solutions. Reader Bruce Gerson suggested using a program called GroupCal from Snerdware, but you have to be also using Microsoft Exchange, which I’m not. Actually GroupCal looks very promising and even provides iPhone support, albeit with limitations. At $55 for a single seat, GroupCal looks like a steal, and Bruce says it is extremely easy to set up.
Other suggestions involved external tools to drive Outlook through its user interface, but what I wanted was something that would work using Outlook scripting and/or APIs.
Reader Joe Kendal wrote to tell me he took the outlook2ical code written by Norm Jones that I mentioned last week and converted it to Visual Basic to run outside of Outlook. Using the Redemption DLL to get around Outlook security, Joe created what he describes as a working solution, except he thinks it is “not production worthy … There needs to be some extra testing and error handling for it to be 100%.”
I haven’t had a chance to test Joe’s code but he says that anyone who wants a copy is welcome. Drop a message to gearhead@gibbs.com with the subject Kendal and the code will automatically be sent to you, then tell me what you think.
