Spanning Sync has finally released a public beta of its Google Calendar-iCal two-way sync app, only to experience so overwhelming a demand for new signups that the beta was closed again.

Spanning Sync is said to offer reliable bidirectional syncing of user-selected Calendars in iCal and Google’s calendar (see a previous Hawk Wings post).

The interface in the beta looks promising:

In a post that went up on the company’s blog soon after the announcement of the public beta, relief was promised for those eager to try out the service:

We’re thrilled (and a little freaked out) by the literally overwhelming response, but we want to make sure all of our users have the best experience possible. With any luck, the public beta will open again tomorrow, with a lot more capacity to handle the load. Thank you for your patience.

Keep your eyes peeled for the re-opening.

[Via TUAW ]

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In the Quicksilver forums today I stumbled across the link that brings you the very latest, more bleeeding-edge version of Quicksilver.

Apparently, setting the “Application Update Type” to “pre-release” in Quicksilver’s Extra Settings doesn’t actually deliver the most recent version.

However, this link does: http://getqs.com/dev/

Quicksilver β50 Bulldog (3787) looks a lot like its precedessors. After thirty minutes of poking around, the only new things I have found are the swish new menubar icon (a Q with a fancy tail) and working previews for the app’s various interfaces in the preferences.

But a large part of the fun with Quicksilver is never knowing what new thing is just around the corner.

Obviously, the pre-pre-release version is not fully polished. So there’s no complaining if it doesn’t all work out as expected.

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AOL has launched a beta test of its Connect for Mac app.

If you have an AOL screen name, you can log in, read the beta announcement and (I am guessing) download the beta from AOL’s beta web site.

Connect for Mac allows AOL members to initiate an online connection to the Internet without launching the full AOL client.

It is already easy to use Mail.app with AOL . Presumably, this makes it even easier.

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A new public beta of NetNewsWire, the RSS reader, is available from Newsgator, the app’s new home.

It has lots of new features and some tweaks to its interface and performance. Hawk Wings’ readers will be especially interested to hear of its tighter integration with Mail.app.

Rather like Safari, two new commands in the File menu offer options for emailing the contents of the news item and for emailing a link to the news item or page.

The email-contents command requires Apple Mail, although the email link command should work equally well with Thunderbird, Entourage and other email clients.

Nice one, Brent.

[Via TUAW ]

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Zimbra , “a rich, full-featured, AJAX-based Web client that brings e-mail and calendar items to life through Web mash-ups on the front end” (kewl!), has announced a beta test of its Apple iSync utility.

This will allow Mac users to sync their calendar and contact data with Zimbra’s web-based interface. It seems to offer a solution for those who fear too great a gulf in Web 2.0 services between server-side data-storage and users’ computers.

The screenshots featured in the announcement show that the beta is already well-developed and offers significant user control over the synchronisation:

The beta test is only open to Zimbra Network Edition or Network trial users. The Open Source Edition is not supported.

Users who qualify can contact their Zimbra sales rep to register their interest.

[Thanks, sjk]

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Boris Anthony has posted a very nice screenshot of the new MailTags 1.2 (now in the final stages of beta-testing).

It shows off the new integration with iCal very well. Check it out.

Every day beta-testers come up with new and interesting ways to extend MailTags 1.2 even more, which sends Scott back to the coding dungeon and delays release a little.

But, boy, it will be worth the wait!

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