iCalendar Events of Canada for iPhone

[+Marvin A]

I love the ability to have multiple calendar on the iPhone. That's why I wanted to have geocache events for my province in the phone. After some research, I realized that nobody seemed to have published a calendar in iCal format, neither my province nor to any other. So I developed a system that compiles the events, make the iCalendars (Thanks to GSAK!) and place it to the internet. I liked the result so much that I finally made the system for all provinces. Up to you to tell me if the system is useful or not!

 

To subscribe to the calendar:

• 
   
  
• Go with your iPhone to the link http://www.plante.ca/ical
  
• Pick a province or provinces that interests you.
  
• Subscribe to the calendar.
  

 

Some points on the system.

• 
   
  
• First, I'm not very good in English. Even if Google help me very much, if you see any errors don't hesitate to tell me.
  
• When you subscribe to a calendar, it can take 30 sec. before seeing the events.
  
• Mega-Events have a asterisk before the code.
  
• For each province, I indicate the distance from 1 to 4 cities. I selected the cities to make it possible to do a little trigonometry, and know roughly where is the event in the province. Feel free to suggest other cities. But, I can not add all suggestions! Geocachers in the province may be needed to talk to themselves!
  
• Caches are updated regularly, about twice a week.
  
• Includes only active caches! Not disabled or Archived!
  
• County in "Location" provided by GSAK.
  
• The iCal are compatible with iPhone and Outlook. That does not mean they are not compatible with other software. Share your experiences!
  
• In Beta test. No SLA (Service Level Agrement) is provided.
  

 

Enjoy!

 

Marvin A"

Edited March 19, 2011 by Marvin A

[+entogeek]

Looks good. One thing though, the events are all listed as All-Day. Not sure if there is a way to include just the actual time of the event.

[+Westacular]

No simple/automatic way: event listings don't have a structured way of recording specific times; you have to read the descriptions.

 

Awesome job! I've wondered for a long time why Groundspeak isn't doing this themselves.

 

A few questions/comments:

 

Is the location field only based on the county name? I ask because I notice some Ontario events listed as being in Brantford, ON -- Brantford is a city; its county name is Brant. That might be a bug in your county data.

 

For any event in southern Ontario, the distances from Thunder Bay and Sault Ste-Marie are useless for getting a rough sense of location. (For northern Ontario, though, they're probably a good choice.) For extra reference points, off the top of my head, I'd say the next two cities that might be most helpful for rough triangulation are Sudbury and London.

[+MikeAndHike]

Alberta doesn't have many events listed but it looks terrific. Tres Bien! Using Calgary and Edmonton are perfect. If you wanted to add Red Deer it is right in the middle of the two but probably not necessary. Marvin A this is so cool! Mercie beaucoup! Le calendrier fonctionne très bien!

 

Can anyone tell me if this will auto check for new events?

And if so, will it send a push notification when it does add events?

 

Again Thank You,

Mike

[+Westacular]

The calendar checks for updates based on your settings (under Mail etc -> Fetch New Data). It doesn't push, so it's the fetch schedule options that apply here. I'd recommend setting this calendar to "manual"; if it's only updated a couple times a week, there's no sense checking in the background every hour. The manual setting is a bit of a misnomer, in my opinion: it just means that it will automatically check for an update only when you load Calendar, and not in the background.

 

No, it won't show notifications for new events. They'll just quietly show up on the calendar. (You could use premium member email notifications + Boxcar to get a parallel stream of push notifications for event caches as they're published)

Edited March 20, 2011 by Westacular

[+Tequila]

Very impressive. I use a 3rd party calendar (Pocket Informant) on my iPhone and it automatically showed up there as well.

 

Thanks for putting the effort into this and giving back to the community.

[+RickOnTheRange]

Very impressive ...

 

Thanks for putting the effort into this and giving back to the community.

 

I agree,

Thanks so much. This system could develop into an amazing planning tool. Well done !

[+brenda&&rew]

I just subscribed... it looks great! Thanks very much!

[+Marvin A]

Sorry for the delay. Very busy at work and working on the following later in this post! Happy that you seem appreciate these iCal.

 

Looks good. One thing though, the events are all listed as All-Day. Not sure if there is a way to include just the actual time of the event.

 

Westacular is right when he says there is no simple way to do this. So I develop a method "not no simple" for owners of a cache to control some options for their event. See below.

 

...

Is the location field only based on the county name? I ask because I notice some Ontario events listed as being in Brantford, ON -- Brantford is a city; its county name is Brant. That might be a bug in your county data.

The county data come directly from GSAK database. I'm not able to change that. The problem is the term "County" that differt from province to another. In Québec, county is a big administrative region and we have 17. I know that in some provinces, counties are much smaller. If you would like more information, I suggest you go to the website of GSAK to discuss. But for the owner of the event, there is a solution! See below!

 

For any event in southern Ontario, the distances from Thunder Bay and Sault Ste-Marie are useless for getting a rough sense of location. (For northern Ontario, though, they're probably a good choice.) For extra reference points, off the top of my head, I'd say the next two cities that might be most helpful for rough triangulation are Sudbury and London.

London seems a good suggestion to add, and I'll replace Sault Ste-Marie by Sudbury as this city seems bigger.

 

Someone have good suggestion for North-West?? Does anyone live there?

 

And now, for owners of caches events!!

I developed and tested in Quebec this week, a system that allows owners to control some parameters listed in iCal/iPhones calendar. We'll see if it works well, but for now this is good. The principle is to add a specific code in the description that will be caught by Geo-iCal system (cool name, no?).

 

Here is the code and explanations:

You should put in the short OR long description the code :

?iCalInfo:YYYYMMDDThhmm;YYYYMMDDThhmm;F;5M;Location;Description"

 

The parameters are separated by;

Code begin with ?iCalInfo: followed by parameters.

Param1# : YYYYMMDDThhmm is the Start time and date. YYYMMMDD is Year, Month, Day. hhmm is Hours, minutes. Warning! The date and time are separated by a capital T! Total should have exactly 13 characters.

Param2# : YYYYMMDDThhmm is the End time and date. same syntax as Param #1

Param3# : Not implemented yet; Leave F

Param4# : Not implemented yet; Leave 5M if you build the code manually.

Param5# : Location; will REPLACE the county, but will precede the province and the country

Param6# : Description; a SMALL description. Will be added following cities in the description.

Be sure to have the quote (") at the end.

 

Example: if the following code for the Entogeek's event (GC2PPXD) is found in the description :

?iCalInfo:20110408T1400;20110408T1600;F;5M;A meeting room in an Ajax condo;This event is an opportunity for you to learn a bit about the diversity of the insects and arachnids with which we share our planet."

people will see this in their iPhone. (Sorry for french parts).

http://www.plante.ca/img/example1.png

 

You find it complicated? You can use this web page to help you create the code. As a bonus you can have a nice icon to popularize the service!

[+Marvin A]

Add the owner's name in the description.

[+all4familycaching]

I just subscribed too and many thanks for your time and efforts for putting this together. And for sharing it too. Great job.

[+GPS Derek]

The link gives me

 

Disabled for the moment

 

Is it going to be fixed, sounds interesting.

 

 

I love the ability to have multiple calendar on the iPhone. That's why I wanted to have geocache events for my province in the phone. After some research, I realized that nobody seemed to have published a calendar in iCal format, neither my province nor to any other. So I developed a system that compiles the events, make the iCalendars (Thanks to GSAK!) and place it to the internet. I liked the result so much that I finally made the system for all provinces. Up to you to tell me if the system is useful or not!

 

To subscribe to the calendar:

• 
   
  
• Go with your iPhone to the link http://www.plante.ca/ical
  
• Pick a province or provinces that interests you.
  
• Subscribe to the calendar.
  

 

Some points on the system.

• 
   
  
• First, I'm not very good in English. Even if Google help me very much, if you see any errors don't hesitate to tell me.
  
• When you subscribe to a calendar, it can take 30 sec. before seeing the events.
  
• Mega-Events have a asterisk before the code.
  
• For each province, I indicate the distance from 1 to 4 cities. I selected the cities to make it possible to do a little trigonometry, and know roughly where is the event in the province. Feel free to suggest other cities. But, I can not add all suggestions! Geocachers in the province may be needed to talk to themselves!
  
• Caches are updated regularly, about twice a week.
  
• Includes only active caches! Not disabled or Archived!
  
• County in "Location" provided by GSAK.
  
• The iCal are compatible with iPhone and Outlook. That does not mean they are not compatible with other software. Share your experiences!
  
• In Beta test. No SLA (Service Level Agrement) is provided.
  

 

Enjoy!

 

Marvin A"

[+Marvin A]

Now Geo-iCal is Google Calendar compatible. So people with Android, will be able to synchronize their Google Calendar with Geo-iCal, then sync the device with the Google Calendar. Do not try the links for the iPhone. I put instructions on the web site (same link as before). The schedule synchronization with Google iCalendar is very slow. About every 6-24 hours. But this should not be a problem.

Last point, notify the owners of Android in your next events; They will not read this topic because it indicated for iPhone in the title! Make them a surprise!

 

If you have any problem, don't hesitate to ask!