The private beta of Spanning Sync’s full two-way iCal and Google Calendar sync app is under way.

Aaron Freedman at MacUser provides a insider’s view of how the app works and how well it works.

It is packaged as a system preference:

Spanning Sync installs not as an application, but a System Preferences panel. In it, you put in your Google Account username and password, and then select which iCal calendars to sync with which Google Calendars. You can also set at which interval to have the calendars sync (or you can just choose to sync only manually), and you can choose to sync alarms on each individual calendar. All of this can be set up very quickly, and once so, you can close System Preferences and, if automatic sync is enables, have your calendars sync in the background.

And it is working pretty well. After some initial duplication problems were sorted out, Aaron is pleased with the app’s performance:

It’s great to be able to use my Google Calendar on my PC, and use iCal at home, and then be able to sync my calendar to portable devices with iCal.

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Mark Stosberg has posted a list of five power tips for serious Thunderbird users.

When Mark switched from mutt, he was “skeptical that any graphical e-mail program could rival Mutt for performance and efficiency, not to mention the simplicity of accessing it anywhere through a text-based console.”

But Thunderbird surprised him. Not only does it rival mutt, it offers “a number of new workflow improvements, especially easier filtering and labels.”

He outlines how he makes the most of Thunderbird’s filtering and labels to increase his productivity and offers four keyboard-enhancing extensions for Thunderbird.

He rounds his list out with “Master keyboard shortcuts” and a tip on using Unison to sync his Thunderbird folder between multiple Macs.

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Mail.app Conduit allows you to transfer email messages between Mail.app and a Palm PDA.

An updated version (2.0.1) has been released, which now supports VersaMail 3.1 as well as Mark/Space Mail.

I don’t own one of these things and can’t test it for myself, but the reports I hear from others are very positive.

After installing the conduit in ~/Library/Application Support/Palm HotSync/Conduits, launching HotSync and selecting Apple Mail from the HotSync Manager, presents you with the following screen:

These preferences offer various options for the transfer that will mean something to Palm users.

Mail.app Conduit requires Mac OS 10.4 or later, Palm Desktop 4.0 or greater and a Palm OS-compatible PDA.

It is freeware although the developer does not refuse donations from satisfied users.

You can get the updated conduit from the developer’s web site , which is also the home of MailUnreadStatusBar.

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