As an owner of a brand new Palm Pre, I recently got exposed to the vagaries of trying to import my Facebook Calendar into my Pre. It’s not as easy as it should be and the fault lies with Facebook and with Palm. While we’re waiting to sort things out, I’ve written a little application, along with the post, to help myself and others out of this pickle

The start of the problem is with Facebook. When you opt to export your Events, Facebook provides you with a URL pointing to an iCalendar file. This contains all the details of your upcoming events. However, what it does not contain (and this is critical) is any timezone information. When you access Facebook normally, it knows what timezone you are in from you computer’s clock and shows events at the according time. This is known as using a ‘floating’ timezone and makes things a lot easier on the FB backend.

However, when you import this iCalendar file into another calendar application, it has no idea what timezone the file represents. Some applications will assume it is your local timezone. Others (especially web applications) may assume that the timezone is GMT. Unless you live in the UK, or other GMT countries, you’re going to see an offset for all of your events.

How does this play into the Pre? Well, I live in Austin, which is in the Central timezone. When I imported my Facebook events, they were off by two hours. After some investigation, I came across this theory, that I find the most compelling: My Pre is synchronised with my FB events via a server at Palm, in the Pacific timezone. Facebook ‘floats’ my events to match the PST timezone. As a result, when they appear in my Pre, they are off by two hours.

So, I though to myself, why not import my FB Events into my Google calendar and use that as my primary calendar. Well, Google has other ideas. It sees an iCalendar file without a time zone, assumes GMT and so shifts all of my events by 6 hours.

As a result, I’ve made this app. Just provide the URL to your Facebook Events Export, set your timezone and give the new calendar a name. A new URL will be generated, which you can then pass to Google Calendars. Within an hour or so, Google will import your events and keep them updated.

You can then sync your Pre (or other PDAs) with your Google Calendar and, hey presto, there are your events.

This process doesn’t add any functionality to the calendar; it just sets to timezone correctly. Any delays in synching will come from the delay of Google synching with Facebook and your Pre synching with Google. My filter adds no significant time overhead at all.

This functionality is provided to you all free of charge. All I ask is that you add comments and suggestions. I’m happy to tweak this and respond to error reports.

The past week has seen a lot of change at preDevCamp. It’s been a busy time, but I believe we’ve found our footing again and it’s time to move forward.

Following our challenges with Palm, whurley and gio have opted to move on to other things. We wouldn’t be where we are without them and I’ve eternally grateful to them for all they did for preDevCamp. I hope I’ll see them at their local events and hope to work with them again on future projects.

Joining the organizing team are Lisa Brewster and Greg Stevenson. I’m very grateful to them, since preDevCamp is, in no way, a one person job.

We’ve spoken to Palm a number of times now and they’re very positive about preDevCamp. They’re offering support and we’re working with them to determine the best way for that support to manifest itself.

Finally, we settled on a date for preDevCamp which balances the various pressures of SDK availability, organization time and conference conflicts. We settled on August 8th and, so far, this seems to have gone across well.

Watch this space for more updates, as they come!

O’reilly release the first chapter of their new webOS book in the past few days and it has been a welcome island in a sea of tedious rumours. While others may wildly speculate on when the Pre will appear, at least we now have some idea of what it will be running.

So what does this chapter tell us about webOS? Well, a lot of the chapter is spent with the usual overview. I tend to skip these chapters in technical books, but webOS is brand new to me, so I gave it the time. Here’s what I learned:

• webOS is expressly intended to support multiple hardware environments with all sorts over screen sizes, resolutions and orientations – This tells me that a good webOS App will not restrict itself to functioning on a Pre form factor
• webOS will use HTML 5 tags to provide storage functions and some graphic functions (using the canvas) – This tells me that I need to get up to speed on HTML 5 and start playing with it in Firefox
• webOS will give you access to Calendar and Contact data, Location Services, Accelerometer data and XMPP messaging  – This tells me that the apps we can make are going to be awwwwesome!
• Mojo will come bundled with the Prototype framework – Since I’m a jQuery fan, this means that I have to learn another JS framework, if I’m going to be able to fully exploit the Pre
• The Core OS will support fat32 for media file partitions (with a mention of mounting via USB) – This suggests that it may be possible to plug a USB drive into the Pre for extra storage and ease of file transfer!

There are some  nice pieces about design philosophy and UI considerations in the first chapter and some high level introduction to concepts such as stages and scenes.

All in all, and interesting read; certainly enough to whet my appetite for the Pre. Here’s what I’m going to be doing in preparation:

1. Learn HTML 5
2. Learn Prototype

I think focusing on those two, for now, will put me in good stead. I recommend the same to you.