14 DAY TRIAL // Google takes great pride in enabling its users to take their data out of products owned by the company. Not all products are supported in the same way, some aren't at all, but Google is making an effort. The latest is a small tool, dubbed Google Tasks Porter, which you can probably figure out what it does.
Google Tasks Porter is part of the Data Liberation Front effort and enables users to export their existing tasks in a variety of formats, which can then be imported by several other task managers and calendar apps, including most of the popular desktop and web-based ones.
"We are happy to announce a new open source product called Google Tasks Porter. Google Tasks Porter is an application that allows you to import and export your Google Tasks," Dwight Guth from The Data Liberation Front announced.
Google Tasks Porter was designed to give users several options in getting their data out and, more importantly, getting their data into another application.
"It supports import and export via the iCalendar format which is used by a variety of applications, including iCalendar itself. It also supports import and export to Microsoft Outlook via a CSV format," Google explained.
"Additionally, Google Tasks Porter supports export from Remember the Milk using its iCalendar export, and import to Remember the Milk via email," it added.
Finally, the data can be exported as a generic HTML file, formatted in such a way as to make it possible to parse the data inside.
The tool also enables users to import data, either in the iCalendar format or as a simple CSV, into Google Tasks. You can check out Google Tasks Porter at its website, powered by Google App Engine.
The source code for the entire app is made available under a very un-restrictive Apache 2.0 license, so you can grab the code and play with it and maybe learn a thing or two.