iPod and Mozilla

Having just gotten an iPod nano for Christmas(yes yes, I’m a conformist, yuppie consumer whore!), I was interested in checking what I could do. With my love for open source and mozilla products(and dislike of Outlook), I decided to look at ways to sync stuff from Thunderbird/Sunbird to the iPod. I already knew that Sunbird can be used to export iCalendar files, but what about Thunderbird contacts.I found is http://mozpod.mozdev.org/ which just happens to be out today. Not having a USB2 port on my own laptop, I haven’t played with it yet. I wonder how it uses vCard files to do it’s business; I don’t think Thunderbird has any built in vCard support, which is a shame, if it did, then syncing with an iPod would be easy.

I have to say that I love the way that standardizing on a product like an iPod means that a lot of neat stuff and cool hacks emerge. It’s the only upside to a monopoly of one product in the mp3 market. I also love the mozilla suite of applications, I think that it truly is a great example of what can be accomplished with open source software.

Sunbird still needs a lot of work, and I think that even better iCalendar format support would be good. Konfabulator(Yahoo! Widgets) is able to use the files to display your events on the desktop. Also, AFAIK there is development in online AJAX calendar apps that support iCalendar. That would be SWEET integration. Maybe Google calendar will have it (but I certainly wouldn’t count on it).
To conclude this quite messy post, I hope that I am able to contribute to the Mozilla project somewhat in 2006, and I’ll also have loads of fun looking at cool stuff for the iPod. I don’t know if i’ll be able to resist putting iPod linux onto it!