Busy week: Calendar sync and Contacts API
Lots of stuff going on this week. There were presidential primaries on Tuesday, and sounds like Apple will have some iPhone SDK news in just a few hours. In addition to that, this week saw:
- Two-way sync between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. Sounds like it works with Google Apps accounts too. I’m sure this will make lots of people happy.
- Google has introduced an API to manage your Google contacts. Google has never tried to hoard your contacts (see this simple tutorial on how to export your Gmail contacts to a CSV or vCard file), but this API makes it much simpler for programs to access your contacts — with your permission, of course.
- Google opened its 2008 Summer of Code. Open-source organizations have a week to sign up as sponsors for student projects. I still want to blog a little more about this.
A bunch of other stuff happened too. The Microsoft blogger that I read the most, Dare Obasanjo, is taking a blogging hiatus. I hope he returns to blogging in some form eventually. Microsoft also had a keynote where they announced a bunch of stuff, including a testable version of IE8. I tried installing this Silverlight thing on my computer and got this dialog box:
Does anyone know what to do with this BIN file? (This is on a non-Windows computer.)
Plus Yahoo introduced FireEagle, which is an API to that lets applications send/store/retrieve location information at Yahoo. I can imagine some fun ways to use that. Kudos to Yahoo for a neat idea, and we’ll see how it develops. Lots of stuff going on this week.