Up North

For quite some time I’ve been meaning to setup a working solution for shared calendars at Imendio. This lead me to try out Google Calendar which is an excellent service from Google. What is more interesting is that Thunderbird/Lightning and Sunbird comes with support to work against your Google Calendar (through a plugin) with synchronizations both ways. For users of Mac OS X iCal there are GCaldaemon (haven’t tested) and Spanning Sync (non-free).

Another option if you are more or less always online is to use Mozilla Prism (scroll down to Prism) to setup a separate “browser” for a specific web application.

Setting up Prism is dead simple and you just have to download a package for your operating system (works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows). Unpack it and run the prism application. You will then get a dialog to setup your web application:

Once you click OK you will get a new windows showing just your web application and a launcher on the desktop (only option on Linux right now). Preferably this launcher could place itself in the menu but just drag it to the panel if you wish.

Voila! Your very own “application” for Google Calendar.

This is also a great solution if you like me use several different accounts at Google and want to stay logged into all at the same time.

A lot of cool stuff is going on in GTK+ at the moment.

New Website
Most visible is probably the much needed revamp of the website. Martyn started the work last year and with Andreas joining Imendio earlier this year, he got help to put the final pieces in place and improve the draft even further.

The site went live yesterday and it’s a really great improvement. Great work all involved!

GTK+ Hackweek in Berlin
In March there will be a GTK+ invitation only gathering in Berlin where the core team have invited those that could help bring GTK+ to the next level. We at Imendio are really excited about this and decided to join as gold sponsor together with Nokia and Red Hat.

Time to get some excitement and vision back into to the project, there is a lot of cool stuff going on around us!

GTK+ on Mac OS X
Earlier this week James Livingston blogged about getting Rhythmbox and Totem up and running on Mac OS X with the native GTK+ port that we have been working on over the last years. Richard has been doing an awesome job in hashing out issues with it and making sure it works as it should.

If you have a spare Mac OS X machine and haven’t tried out the native port yet, get over to our developer pages and learn how to set it up.

Our aim is to have an easily installable framework for Mac OS X finished within the next couple of weeks to make it very easy to setup your Mac OS X machine for cross platform application development with GTK+.

I was looking around for a way to test your helper functions in Ruby on Rails and stumbled over a plugin called helper_test that helps you set it up.

You can find it at nubyonrails.com.

Follow the instructions on the web site in order to install the plugin and generate your test files.