Scott, thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately these are limitations with Google Calendar -- we'd love to be able to have individual tasks and reminders too :) The only way to achieve this currently is by subscribing to the iCalendar feed, which will show the individual tasks on your calendar and allow you to receive notifications for them. Unfortunately, this feature only works with public lists (again, due to limitations with Google Calendar). Hope this helps!

Thanks for the reply, Emily. Hopefully, the Calendar folks will figure something out.

I'm not certain what the iCalendar feed is, but if it is simply another calendar that I would have to work with, then that's more troouble than it is worth! I keep seeing that you are working on this, but if it is a G-cal issue, then you probably aren't really doing anything active to fix this. Am I correct there?

The only other calendar I use is Lightning, the replacement for the Mozilla calendar, which is an add-on to my email program, Thunderbird. It works well for me because it syncs with the Google Calendar, and since it is a part of my email client I see it every day.

Is there anything in the works for Lightning? Otherwise, Remember the Milk is becoming difficult for me to maintain, mainly because it does not interact with anything else I can use. Currently I have to visit the RTM site and work on my tasks separately from any other tool.

Thank you.

Jim

Oh, I should also note that every solution I have seen so far says that my list must be published as "Public". Why is that? I have no desire to have my task list visible to everyone; if my tasks were all of a public nature I guess that would be different. But I don't keep track of tasks that are mostly for public consumption. Not that they are particularly something that is so personal that no one can know about them; but they are just my day-to-day things to-do. It is not really wise to publish all of your daily activities for all to see. Opens people up to personal security issues.

Thanks.

Jim

Jim-
iCalendar isn't another calendar, but more of a protocol for viewing calendar information. You can easily set up Google Calendar to automatically receive and display these feeds.

Google calendar does not yet support authenticated iCalendar feeds, meaning, yes, you have to make tasks public. But note that this setting can be separate for each list, so you can have one list that is public that you put everything you want to be on Google Calendar (and don't care if people see it).

Hello,

Why not take a page from Google's own book for authneticated calendar access and have the "private iCalendar address" which contains an authentication token, along with a "public calendar URL" which only works for publically shared calendars.

This is a better approach than requiring support for "authenticated calendar feeds".

For a long time I disliked the security-through-obscurity approach (the private address method), but I see so few sites supporting authentication that I've changed my mind. I'd love to see RTM move on this.

Ran, you won't believe this but I woke up this morning thinking exactly the same thing. How weird is that? :)

We'd been hoping that more services would support authentication, but it doesn't look like that's likely to happen -- so we're considering the "private" URL approach.

We'd just need to make sure that people are aware that these iCalendar/Atom/RSS feeds would have URLs that are hard to guess, but that doesn't guarantee that tasks remain private (we can't control what happens once you give this URL to another service, who might make this URL searchable).

Anyway, something to look into once Bob finishes sorting...

Great minds think alike, maybe?

I don't whether to be happy or sad that you wake up thinking about authenticated feed adoption rates.

Give Bob an attaboy from far away for all of his hard work.

Come to think of it, maybe waking up thinking about feeds isn't something that I should be admitting to on the Interwebs... it is pretty sad.

I passed your message on to Bob -- he was thrilled to learn that his efforts are appreciated :) Maybe he's earnt an extra banana...

emily et al - I'm afraid that you will have to explain this a little more for me. (I must be slow). I posted here a couple weeks ago and my understanding was that to be able to actually have RTM show on another online calendar would be to make it public, which in my case would not be wise. My stuff is really just personal tasks and appointments, like Dr. appts., etc. Nothing tremendously confidential, but stuff I just wouldn't want to be generally viewable. I realize that this is not an RTM issue per se, but a G-Cal issue.

Now I see that it might be possible with private URLs, but I don't fully understand the part about sites with authentication. How would I know? And what would authentication do - make my tasks public? If it would be an Atom or RSS feed, I have noticed lately that seemingly half the search results I see on Google anymore ARE RSS feeds. (And I really hate when I don't notice that and click on it anyway!)

What I have done recently is to take the webcal address for my RTM stuff and import it to Lightning - the Thunderbird calendar extension. All of my RTM stuff there is now showing, and it refreshes regularly. I also have Lightning syncing with my Google calendar, but since my Google calendar is not public the RTM tasks do not show up daily. Or perhaps it is because Lightning allows tasks to show directly on the calendar and Google does not. Anyway, at least my RTM tasks are now showing in my Lightning calendar! The only better solution would be for RTM to offer a calendar feature! Or, to partner with, say 30 Boxes or Spongecell. That would about make things perfect for me!

Thanks

Jim

BTW, something I forgot to mention about showing all my RTM tasks in Lightning: In cases where I created a task, say three months ago and then postponed it until now because of external circumstances (Like a meeting canceled and rescheduled by the organizers for the following quarter - just so you don't think I am THAT much of a procrastinator!), the start date apparently stays where it was originally even though you don't commonly see that in RTM. So in Lightning, that task will appear on every day from the start to the due date! In those infrequent cases I am just deleting the tasks and then recreating it.

Is anyone else using RTM in Lightning like this?

Thanks,

Jim

Jim, sorry for the confusion. Currently, it is necessary to make your list public to subscribe to its iCalendar feed in Google Calendar.

The alternative option (which we're considering supporting) is to have "private" iCalendar URLs. Basically, each list would be given a URL containing a long secret code (making it just about impossible to stumble upon the URL). It's much more secure than publishing a list in order to subscribe to it, but not as secure as requiring authentication (username/password).

If anyone did get hold of the "private" URL, they'd be able to see your tasks. As Ran mentioned, it's security by obscurity (as in, you hope that nobody else discovers the URL :) Also, if you gave this URL to another service, we couldn't control what they did with it (so you'd need to be careful about giving it to a service that might make it searchable).

Anyway, that's something that we're still looking at, so it's not supported yet. Hope this helps (it's 2am so I may not be writing that clearly :)

And the Lightning issue... sorry I'm not sure what's happening with this, we can check this out.

Thanks emily.RTM in Lightning is actually looking good! The issue regarding RTM tasks showing for a long time is only if one postpones a task for an extended period - it then shows on every day from the original date created until the latest due date. This is probably correct behavior. I just need to create new tasks and delete the old rather then "postponing" tasks.

Thanks.

Jim

If it's simple to do, I would love to see a private feed. I still don't know why somebody as big as google can't implement authentication--is it that tough?? But private feeds is at least secure enough for what I would be using.

Thanks Emily and Bob.