Freeloader Friday Download of the Week

Online Office

Contacts, calendars and tasks lists are great, if you have your Mac handy. But if you're on the move, and on other computers during the day, how to you keep things in sync?

By moving your information online, you'll get universal access to your data. With today's picks you'll also be able to sync your info back into your Mac applications.

This week's picks are all PHP/MySQL web-based applications, so to take advantage of them you'll need hosting that supports these. If you're looking, consider 1&1, A Small Orange, Dreamhost or Pair.

The Address Book

This online contacts solution offers the speed of MySQL to the convenience of vCard portability. The Address Book easily manages many contacts, and exports easily to many formats including vCard, so you can bring your web-based contacts right back into OS X's Address Book.

Multiple user support and authentication allow you to share your contacts with only the people you want to. Unfortunately there isn't upload support for vCards, but if you're interested in a four step conversion (requiring Address Book Exporter, Excel and phpMyAdmin) contact me at brian AT macmerc DOT com and I'll send you the details.

VTCalendar

This gem comes courtesy of Virginia Tech. With VTCalendar you can manage your calendar on your own server. You can even divide your calendar into sub calendars by category and subscribe to your calendar(s) via iCal.

A handy JavaScript pop-up calendar (for choosing dates) and internal authentication make this an easy-to-use and powerful calendar system.

Tasks Jr

Tasks Jr is a free version of Alex King's Tasks web-based task manager. While it doesn't have the advanced features of Tasks, it is more than robust enough for most of us.

Tasks Jr manages your task online with priority and % complete tracking. Better still, it provides a calendar of your tasks (both scheduled and unscheduled) which you can subscribe to and view right in iCal. Hierarchal organization and a PDA/Mobile friendly interface don't hurt either.

That wraps up out quest to move our personal information to the web, while keeping in within the reach of your Address Book and iCal. Now, don't forget to back up those databases!

For those of you without PHP/MySQL hosting (come on, it's cheaper than .Mac!) stay tuned for a future episode where we'll look at similar solutions hosted by 3rd party service providers.

Until then, keep it free...

Brian   


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