MyMacWorld Calendar, Outlook Compatible

brunerd MacWorld

So, the MyMacWorld site made by BDMetrics has an “Export to PDA” function that supports Outlook and not iCal. Try and import the ics file into iCal and you’ll get:"This calendar file is unreadable. No events have been added to your iCal calendar"Guh!? Let’s go back and read the description of what this exporting will get you:

This exports all your scheduled items in a single, iCalendar or vCalendar file. You may then import this file into any iCalendar-compliant system such as OutlookTM, then subsequently synch to your PDA.

Oh super, Outlook. That’s great for the PC manager who gets sent to MacWorld to see what this Mac hullaballoo is all about, but it’s useless for 95% of MacWorld’s attendees. Are you serious BDMetrics?

Update:
OK After spending way too long looking at Apple’s iCal specs and messing with the tags and blogging the whole thing (and using ♥ in my URL, so the thing broke on every other browser besides Safari!) I have the solution. But first the reason they don’t work:

  • iCal will only read VERSION:2.0 tagged files, MyMacWorld is VERSION:1.0
  • The iCalendar spec call for CRLF ending, they use an LF only

    • HA! Of course a spec written in 1998 by an MS employee calls for CRLF line endings! Of course, it makes sense now!

    OK so here’s the code. Get thee to a Terminal, cd to where your ics file is, and copy and paste following onto one line, and you’ll be good to go
    perl -p -e 's/VERSION:1.0/VERSION:2.0/g' ShowCalendar.ics | perl -p -e 's/(\r\n|\n|\r)/\r\n/g' > newShowCalendar.ics

    6 thoughts to “MyMacWorld Calendar, Outlook Compatible”

    2. Thanks for the post – which brought this situation to our attention. We routinely monitor blogs and other communications in order to stay on top of user experiences (and the opinions they express!), and to quickly catch and address things that may inadvertently fall through the cracks. This was unfortunately one of them. My personal regrets and apologies to those negatively affected by this one.

      Armed with the benefit of this poster’s legwork, we’ve pushed through a build which fixes this problem. You should find that your MyMacWorld portal will now properly support iCal.

      Thanks again for the post – and for those converging on MacWorld… have a great show!

      Don Mahoney
      COO – BDMetrics, Inc.

    4. Isn’t perl a little heavy for this? How about a purpose built stream editor, and keeping it in one process instead of using two and pipes?

      Something more like this :

      sed -E -e ‘s/VERSION:1.0/VERSION:2.0/g’ ShowCalendar.ics -e ‘s/(\r\n|\n|\r)/\r\n/g’ > newShowCalendar.ics

      Just call me an unix hack that never learned that new fangled perl :-)

    5. craptastic, I misfired on the copy/paste, had the original .ics in the wrong spot.

      sed -E -e ’s/VERSION:1.0/VERSION:2.0/g’ -e ’s/(\r\n|\n|\r)/\r\n/g’ ShowCalendar.ics > newShowCalendar.ics

    6. Thanks, for everyone’s contributions. It was late and I just wanted the darn thing to work, and I had some false starts in awk and sed, so when I found the perl regexp example I just piped them together… I had tried multiple -e expressions in perl but it didn’t like that, so thanks for the tip. And thank you BD Metrics for correcting the misstep, nice to see such a fast response I honestly didn’t who you guys were or if you’d be responsive, so I cooked up a fix, glad it was a temporary one. Thanks all, glad to have more comments than fake pharma spam :D

    Comments are closed.