From Palm to Android - Migration Part II: Calendar and no Tasks

So the second part of migrating my data from Palm to my Android HTC was to get the calendar (aka Date Book) data into Google Calendar.

I did not bothered migrating the To Do List aka Tasks, as I did not see the point of keeping an history of this. I will simply create new tasks.

La seconde partie de la migration de mes données depuis le Palm dans mon HTC Android a consisté à importer l'agenda du Palm dans Google Agenda.

Je n'ai pas migré la To Do List (liste de Taches) car je ne vois pas l'intérêt de conserver un historique de ceci. Je créerai directement de nouvelles taches.

(tout le reste est uniquement en Anglais)

Calendar Migration

To migrate my calendar info from my Palm to my Android, I first tried to use PdbConverter, which should have been straight forward.
Unfortunately, the extraction did not work for me and produced a file with no real data in it.

Then I extracted all the data from the calendar, using J-Pilot, producing another an iCalendar file (.ICS), but this time with data in it.
I had all my 10 years of appointments which I thought might not be that useful in the HTC (that was the point of using PdbConverter, to be able to select a date range for the import) ... but I imported it all in Google (creating a separate calendar to avoid troubles and to be able to delete all data at once).
The import seemed to bug, as I got an error message (something like "server is temporary down, try again later) ... but the data was indeed imported in Google and I was a happy monkey ! !

Till I realise the Android sync imported data only not older than a month ! ! !
That a well known bug/feature (id=3672) from Google ... unfortunately I could not get any workaround to make it for me.
So I did not get all my history (I wanted all the year 2010 events).
I ended editing a handful of important past events in Google Calendar to get them to sync to the Android, far from perfect ... but that's the way it goes, till I can find a better solution.

Birthdays

There's a birthday field in Google contacts. To get the birthdays from contacts to show in your Google calendar, you need to perform a couple of operations.
In the Other Calendars section of the left column,  click Add  then Browse Interesting Calendars.  You should see something like Contacts’ birthdays and events : get it (you might as well get other calendars too, I got my soccer team calendars ... but they don't display on Android ? ! ?).

During the contacts import, I imported the data ... but that was imported in a custom field instead of the dedicated Birthday column ! ! :-(
On top of that, to get the birthday showing in the calendar, I have to display the calendar in another language (e.g. English instead of French), when I switch back to French the birthday dates remains ... but new ones won't show ... till I switch to English again ! ! :-(
I thought I will keep the agenda in English ... but same thing happens: I have to switch it to French to get the new birthday dates showing ! ? ! ?

Software

For the calendar, the HTC calendar is not that great particularly to display information, so once you have set up all the Google calendars you want to see on your Android, forget about this application and get Jorte: it really rocks. It reads/writes all information from the Android agenda database, and it's quite pretty and really user friendly ... nearly as good as a Palm.

For a tasks/to do list application, Jorte will allow to manage a list that is synchronised with Google Tasks web application (although it has to started by the user, no automatic sync). It's simple (no importance or category field) but that works !
For something more sophisticated, which synchronise with other web services, use Astrid (the reference at the moment ... so everybody says).

That's it for now.
Next post will be about the memos/notes: a big subject ! !

Note:
I did not need this ... but you might ! !
Palm2CSV =  Convert your Palm Desktop files( Calendar-DBA or To Do-TDA) to CSV Format