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fbCal is a godsend for those who tend to forget birthdays (like me) and rarely log into Facebook anymore (like me) [even when I did, I never really noticed the upcoming birthdays on the homepage anyway]. fbCal (a Facebook-app) generates RSS-/iCalendar-feeds for your friends’ birthdays & your upcoming events on FB, which you then can pipe into Google Calendar, iCal etc. but don’t cry if you still forget your best friends birthday, maybe he/she hasn’t made this data available to you on FB at all…

connecting the off- with the online, Spanning Sync promises bidirectional synchronisation between (muliple instances of) Apple iCal and Google Calendar. utilizing iSync, the application also syncs up mobilephones and iPods. the downside? after getting you hooked during the 15days free trial, Spanning Sync costs 65 USD once or 25 USD a year, which seems quite a lot for a little sync-app (via R/WW).

at first glance remember the milk is just another web2.0-ish to-do manager (other popular options include Basecamp’s Ta-da Lists and Voo2do). though it features a clean interface, options for publishing and sharing to-do lists as well as a Google Maps-mashup, what really makes it interesting to me is the integration with Google Calendar that was reviewed by Ajaxian yesterday. remember the milk’s to-do lists can be injected with full read/write-access into GCal simply by importing an external calendar-feed. this is a neat workaround, at least until Google finally builds native support for to-do lists into Gcal.

offline-synching calendar Scrybe (earlier coverage), generating a lot of noise with a demo-screencast published earlier, has been launched into closed beta today. while I’m still waiting for my account to be approved, TechCrunch confirms the core functionality everybody got so excited about. as supposed by many, Scrybe is a flash-based application. stay tuned for a detailed review!

this is probably not news, but I just recognized that Gmail/Calendar seems to handle event-invitations via email (like typically sent by Microsoft Outlook/Exchange-users) quite well. not only does Gmail offer to create an event-entry in Google Calendar (I was aware of that), but it also allows to give direct response (”Are you coming? Yes/NoMaybe…”) to the sender. the same seems to work with outgoing email (”Add event info”). seems like the last missing peaces of the “how-to create an outlook-killer”-puzzle are getting in place!

watching their promotional video, Scrybe is going to be the next generation of online calendar-applications. more so, the dynamically zooming calendar views look slicker than any desktop schedule seen so far. besides common calendar functionality, Scrybe manages integrated tasklists and stores thoughts and web-snippets of all kind. the not-to-be-missed video demos the gorgeous user-interface, extended suppot for different timezones, impressive copy&paste import from office-applications (Microsoft Excel in particular) and - a bit oldschool but nonetheless handy - printing-capabilities.

while this all sounds (& looks) great, the best is yet to come: Scrybe promises seamless offline access, therefor overcoming current online office-apps’ major drawback. it’s not really clear how this offline mode & synchronisation will be implemented, but possible solutions would be a local desktop-application, a local proxy-server or some kind of flash storage (the latter being the most advanced & platform-independent approach - also, a commenter at Ajaxian pointed out the Scrybe is most likely a Flash/Flex-application).

beta-accounts should be available somewhere until the end of october, and according to the buzz I’m not the only one looking forward to get my hands on Scrybe

Google added some minor enhancements to their online-calendar today. the new features seem not to be fully rolled out to all servers yet, but according to Lifehacker it’s nothing too exciting - integration of weather forecasts, moon-calendar and the ‘Doodle’-header image known from the search engines frontpage. while that’s kindof lame, I’m starting to get into the service itself - especially now that I’ve synched it in both directions with iCal and my mobile phone.