tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84518532024-03-12T18:57:56.413-04:00Time Has Come TodayIt's long past time when we should be able to use calendar tools for daily life! I'll try to keep this blog on topic, discussing the state of calendaring tools for personal, organizational, and inter-organizational use.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1155080035917504222006-08-08T19:18:00.000-04:002006-08-08T19:33:55.983-04:00Apple polishes its calendar supportIn a move that's sure to help all of the iFolk in their iLives, Apple has announced improved calendaring support in Leopard, the new version of OS X. They've improved the <a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/aug/07leopard.html">client-</a> <span style="font-weight: bold;">and</span> <a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/aug/07leopardserver.html">server-side</a> calendaring support, including announcing support for <a href="http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/index.html">CalDAV</a>. At the same time, Apple has announced it is joining <a href="http://www.calconnect.org/">The Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium</a>. They offer a <a href="http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/icalserver.html">sneak peek</a> at all of this, too.<br /><br />Apparently, at least one major vendor of software used at home (sorry, IBM but I don't see much of Notes on home desktops) has come to the realization that we really, really want our calendars to work together, and not just with calendars on other OS X Machines, and they're taking steps to get there.<br /><br /><a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010857931033.aspx">Microsoft?</a> When are you gonna join? I know you're working on calendar stuff; but it would be nice if you participated in the organizations with your peers, too! <br /><br />CalDAV and the Consortium are great examples of how vendors can win by cooperating; we the consumers just want our stuff to work across the net without wondering what the other guy has, CalDAV is one way to do that.<br /><br />To quote: "All we are saying, is give peace a chance"Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1153594117486247612006-07-22T14:42:00.000-04:002006-07-22T14:48:37.496-04:00Calendar Interop Demonstrated in MiamiFor those few of you that read this blog for calendaring info, let me point you to <a href="http://calendarswamp.blogspot.com/2006/07/interoperable-freebusy-info-demoed-by.html">this entry</a> at <a href="http://calendarswamp.blogspot.com">Calendar Swamp</a>. Scott Mace reported on a demonstration for <a href="http://www.opengroup.org">The Open Group</a> of free/busy interoperability. This was done by <a href="http://www.calconnect.org">The Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium</a> using <a href="http://www.caldav.org">CalDAV</a>with participation of several member companies. <br /><br />Read Scott's post and his links to other documents for the details.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1144902412730367022006-04-13T00:24:00.000-04:002006-04-17T22:36:01.850-04:00Google Calendar arrivesIt appears the long-rumored <a href="http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/overview.html">Google Calendar</a> is here. The overview looks good - but the proof will be in how well it handles the everyday things we all want to do with Calendars. Wonder if they will participate in <a href="http://www.calconnect.org">CalConnect</a> interops now?<br /><br /><b>Update</b> Due to various projects at work and home, I probably won't be able to play with Google Calendar very much; what I've seen looks okay. As with practically anything else done by Google, there are a googol of blogs covering it - so I don't think you'll miss my commentary very much.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1143520885835583802006-03-27T23:09:00.000-05:002006-03-27T23:41:25.906-05:00A Modest Proposal<a href="http://fatcaterpillar.org/journal/2006/03/27/when_daylight_savings_attacks.php">This post</a> describes some issues they're having because some Australian states decided to delay Daylight Savings Time a week, but apparently nobody told their Exchange server(s). Not a huge deal really - some meetings may be off nu an hour for that one week - but it does bring up the issue of how timezones are a real pain in the calendaring world.<br /><br />You can read elsewhere about the timezone issues, about there being no standard (NIST, IETF, ISO, ANSI, or otherwise) for timezones, and about there not even being standardization in one country (there was a fairly funny "West Wing" episode where two supposedly brilliant guys miss their plane because they're in a part of the US which doesn't do the daylight saving time thing). You'll quickly wonder why we let ourselves get in the mess we are in with timezones. <br /><br />The answer? We let the political bodies get involved in determining where timezones begin and end, and whether to participate in daylight saving time changes. So instead of having a set of evenly divided timezones, like orange slices, we have a larger set of irregular pieces, with different rules and regulations apply to each as far as when to switch to an hour ahead or behind, or not - however their voters see fit.<br /><br />It is high time for some international body to hold a meeting, and declare that henceforth we're all going to use <b>one</b> set of <b>regular</b> timezones, without adjustments for daylight savings time to mess us up twice a year. The question is, how to define them?<br /><br />A lot of people would probably go for 24 zones, 15 degrees of longitude each. That's a simple case, but each zone is then over 1000 miles wide at the equator. That means that there's quite a bit of variance between solar noon (when the sun is directly overhead) and the noon on the clock. The east end of the zone is approximately 30 minutes behind solar noon, and the western end is 30 minutes ahead. <br /><br />If I had to have timezones, I'd propose that we do 96 zones which are 3.75 degrees of longitude wide. The center of each zone would be 15 minutes from the zone to either side of it, and a zone would be approximately 250 miles from side to side, which is large enough to encompass most states, cities, townships, or what have you.<br /><br />I have, however, a more radical proposal - do away with timezones entirely. Everyone set their watch or the time on their computer or whatever to UCT, the time at the Greenwich Meridian, and just adjust your thought processes - in most of Florida, for example, we'd get used to going to lunch at 17:00 and getting off work at 22:00. The times we use are just arbitrary names for one part of the day, anyway; they're probably all based on concepts like "noon" - everyone has a local "noon" when the sun is overhead, but you can call any clock time you want "noon", everyone will know what you mean.<br /><br />This would have its opponents, especially in the US where we haven't even gone to the metric system yet (why the world's most scientifically innovative country can't seem to work in base 10 is a mystery to me) - but it would sove a <b>lot</b> of other issues and it would definitely make the calendar software folks happier!<br /><br />While we're warping time (not space) - realize this would get rid of Daylight Saving Time too - which just modifies the local referents for what time it is: "noon" moves to a different point in the sky because somebody said so. I won't miss it when it's gone.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1142643671639185342006-03-17T19:45:00.000-05:002006-03-17T20:01:55.616-05:00Eventful and. Upcoming<a href="http://www.eventful.com">Eventful</a> and <a href="http://www.upcoming.org">Upcoming</a> are two very similar "event database" systems, which host event listings, allow you to add or search for events, and allow you to filter them by various criteria or tags. <br /><br />I think Upcoming is pretty good, but Eventful wins in my book for one simple reason: I can click on a button in an event, or list of events, and open it in my calendar program, currently Outlook, as long as that program handles files of MIME type "text/calendar". This makes it really easy to move an event listing to my own personal calendar, which is where it needs to end up. I've only tested this on my PC - it <span style="font-weight:bold;">might</span> work on a mobile phone, if that phone's software can handle opening the file type. I'm told the PalmOS can open it, but that may only be in e-mail, and not a browser. Even so, it's very useful.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1139016711544935742006-02-03T20:06:00.000-05:002006-02-03T20:31:51.623-05:00A new calendar tool about to hit...Via the blog of the famous <a href="http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/">Robert Scoble, </a> I read about <a href="http://beta.30boxes.com/">30 boxes</a> (note, the link is not open yet, apparently the public beta begins Sunday - 2/5/2006). This is an application that is a web-based, Ajax-powered calendar that allows sharing of your calendar with "buddies". Scoble points to an early review by <br /><a href="http://thomashawk.com/2006/02/30-boxes-best-calender-ever.html">Thomas Hawk</a>, which was very interesting.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1138583585119297682006-01-29T20:12:00.000-05:002006-01-29T20:22:47.600-05:00"That's not a calendar... THIS is a calendar"Have you noticed how many "calendars" on the 'Net are really just passive representations? An awful lot of them are just HTML or PDF versions of what you used to get in paper newsletter- a static "printout" of dates and times, that isn't of any use to anything else on your computer. <br /><br />On the other hand, <strong>some</strong> organizations do make an effort, providing each event with a link that causes the event to open in your local calendaring program, usually by providing a link to an iCalendar file.<br /><br />The difference in usability between the two is really painfully obvious: picture yourself going to the school website of your kid, and on that website you find a link labelled "school calendar". Great, you think, I'll add all of Little Johnny's football practices to the family calendar. You click the link, only to find out that it's a PDF, and if you want to add those items, you're going to have to retype each and every one of them. Not very customer-friendly, I'd say. If they had opted to provide the "active" link to an .ics file, you could select ech of the events and add them to your calendar where they'd be most useful.<br /><br />Vendors are starting to get serious about 'shared calendars" and this is a small but important step - they need to provide ways for all of the organizations in our lives to easily give us these active calendar links.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1137633828388445892006-01-18T19:45:00.000-05:002006-01-18T20:23:48.416-05:00Why subscribe??If you've read my profile, you know I work with mainframes. In most cases (and in this one), it means the person involved has a lot of years under their belt. I happen to have worn many hats during that time period, one of which was supporting communications.<br /><br />That experience leads me to question the current model of "subscribing" to things like calendars and RSS feeds. It's not subscribing in the e-mail / mailing-list sense, at all. Instead, it's what we used to call "polling". In polling, one device wakes up every so often, and sends a signal to the other to say "do you have something for me?". If the other end has something, it sends it, otherwise it replies basically "no, try later". The former is called productive polling, and the latter of course is non-productive polling. Non-productive polling is bad, because it uses network bandwidth to little effect. The trick, however, is to get the polling frequency "right" - too slow, and response time of the application is bad; too fast and you just increase the proportion of polling which is non-productive.<br /><br />Non-productive polling is already happening with RSS feeds, with people setting their aggregators to check their favorite feeds too often. The underlying protocol is basically an HTTP version of "has there been an update?" (do you have anything for me?) and "not yet" (no, try later). It is multiplied by the fact that sometimes there are thousands of these aggregators asking per hour. There are also aggregators which are poorly implemented and which retrieve the latest feed over and over again even if it has NOT been implemented - which means they ignore the "efficiency" of "no, try later" and retrieve the entire piece of data again, over and over. One site owner, <a href="http://blog.glenf.com">Glenn Fleishman</a>, even studied some of these effects and <a href="http://blog.glennf.com/mtarchives/004540.html">wrote some code</a> to deal with them that helped, but of course it didn't eliminate the source of the issue.<br /><br />Calendar subscriptions, I fear, may in fact have the same problem, as people's calendaring tools keep checking to see if their favorite calendars have been updated. Given some people's desire to constantly be "up-to-date" they may set their tools to check even more frequently than they check RSS feeds, driving up the proportion of non-productive "polling".<br /><br />Contrast this with a mailing list subscription. A mailing list uses bandwidth <strong>only</strong> when there's information to send. It of course requires a central mailing list service, which retains the addresses of the subscribers. There is <strong>some</strong> "polling" involved - your e-mail client checks regularly to see if "You've got mail!" which is a polling activity- but I don't think people generally set it to run so frequently.<br /><br />Maybe we could combine the two to improve efficiency: when you subscribe to an RSS feed or calendar, it would send via e-mail some XML representing the new information, in a MIME segment with the proper Content-type, and e-mail clients would pass this to the local (desktop) aggregator or calendar client. This would work well in calendaring tools that already layer on top of e-mail, such as Notes and Outlook, wouldn't it?Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1137631473527183692006-01-18T19:41:00.000-05:002006-01-18T19:44:33.536-05:00Outlook 12: is WebCalendaring an implementation of CalDAV, or something else?I "hear" that Outlook 12 will have a "Sharing Server", and that among other things it supports a new function named "WebCalendaring". <br /><br />Could it be that Microsoft is implementing CalDAV (a calendar-specific sharing protocol based on WebDAV)? <br /><br />Or are they just providing compatibility with Apple's iCal calendar publishing and subscribing?Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1137474194850482442006-01-16T23:39:00.000-05:002006-01-17T00:03:14.906-05:00The time has come to get back to posting!I've really been remiss in keeping this up. I'm going to try to do better, and I'll start with some interesting news.<br /><br />Hans Bjorhdahl, who refers to himself as <a href="http://news.com.com/Tech+executives+Time+is+of+the+essence/2100-1032_3-5984808.html">"the calendar guy"</a> for Micrsoft Outlook, says in some comments on his comics site <a href="http://www.bugbash.net/archives/article/2005/12/back-to-the-future-at-when-20.html">Bug Bash</a> that Microsoft Outlook will include a new, better UI, but also <strong>improved support for iCalendar</strong>. It looks as though Microsoft is getting serious about iCalendar interoperability, and practically nothing could be better for us as users of calendar products. Even if you don't use Outlook, you're sure (like I am) to need to interact with someone who does. Improvement of the situation can only benefit all of us. They still need to join <a href="http://www.calconnect.org">the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium</a>, though.<br /><br />Secondly, I just learned of the <a href="http://www.release1-0.com/events/When2index.php">When 2.0</a> conference which was held in December, organized by Esther Dyson. Ms. Dyson (someone correct me and let me know if she prefers to be called something other than "Ms. Dyson") is a leading thinker whose opinions are highly respected in technological circles. When she and her group become interested in a topic, it can generate a lot of good "buzz", these kinds of things are generally very helpful at keeping momentum going, or starting something for that matter.<br /><br />Even though we've been seeing a lot of progress in the calendaring field lately, I'd like to quote one phrase from the page linked to on that <a href="http://www.release1-0.com/events/When2index.php">When 2.0</a> page:<br /><blockquote>With the growing use of cell-phones, GPS devices and local search, location has come to have meaning on the Net. But we still ignore time - even though computers already "understand" it far better than they do space.</blockquote>That's exactly right - we've let our calendar tools be "good enough" for far too long, adopting the attitude that as long as they work for us personally, we don't neeed to worry (yet) about making them work with others' calendars.<br /><br />That's the latest I have right now. I'm going to try to be more prolific in my posts going forward.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1123437618191360632005-08-07T10:35:00.000-04:002005-08-07T14:00:20.260-04:00New IETF Working Group for CalendarThere's a new <a href="http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/calsify-charter.html">calendar working group</a> at the IETF. This group's purpose is to simplify and improve the iCalendar standards. Complexity of the standards, and different interpretations in different vendors' implementations have been significant inhibitors to interoperability. This group's charter is specifically designed to solve those problems. <br /><br />I hope that all interested parties contribute to the WG and, of course, continue to work with the <a href="http://www.calconnect.org"> Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium</a>. Once interoperability is achieved, and calendar services seem as plumbing-like as electronic mail, there's no telling what new capabilities we'll have!Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1119412235159201212005-06-21T23:30:00.000-04:002005-06-21T23:50:37.246-04:00Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin...Seems that I need to set some kind of calendar alarm to remind me to post here!<br /><br />I haven't heard any new news on the Calconnect.org front, although there was another Interop in early June, so there's nothing to report there.<br /><br />There is, however, some new news as far as uses of iCalendar goes. <br /><br />I regularly attend SHARE, which is a conference of computer users. SHARE started as a group of IBM users 50(!) years ago in 1955. They are now a group of IBM users, but users of anything which runs IBM software. The conference happens twice a year, and the sessions at SHARE run the gamut from Windows desktops to "giant" (actually smaller than some server racks) z/990 machines. <br /><br />Like many other groups, SHARE tries to have conference agendas online to make it easier to plan your attendance. Well, starting with the next conference, their 105th, each session will have a calendar link attached to it, which allows you to dowload and open an iCalendar file! This, of course, lets you add the sessions directly to your calendar, if your calendar package supports iCalendar. It works in Outlook - I tested it at home even though I don't use Outlook for my home calendar. It won't, of course, work in Palm Desktop - because its VERSION component is "2.0" and Palm Desktop doesn't support that "new-fangled" iCalendar, they just support vCalendar. It <span style="font-style: italic;">may</span> work in Apple's iCal but I don't have one to test with.<br /><br />At any rate, this is great news - now we will be able to build our own personal agendas and sync them to our PDAs (if we have them). If you've ever tried to keep track of what sessions you want to attend for a large conference like SHARE, you'll realize what a boon this is.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1117245565794372082005-05-27T21:53:00.000-04:002005-05-27T21:59:25.800-04:00More good news!The July 2005 issue of Linux Journal has an article about extracting calendar information from a browser and building iCalendar info on the fly to return to the browser as MIME type "text/calendar". <br /><br />This tells me that suddenly we have some traction, some visibility, for the calendaring issue - outside of "enterprise" products from proprietary vendors. Things are starting to happen, folks!Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1113958246353332882005-04-19T20:38:00.000-04:002005-04-19T21:30:38.196-04:00Good signs....There are several good signs lately in the calendar world.<br /><br />First, the <a href="http://www.calconnect.org">Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium</a> seems to be making progress with membership, they have some big players and are trying to recruit more. <br /><br />Second, on the mailing lists related to calendar sharing via DAV, called <a href="http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-caldav">CalDAV</a>, things seem to be progressing fairly smoothly and they keep producing new drafts.<br /><br />Third, the <a href="http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-calsify">iCalendar simplification effort</a> is progressing, with a lot of activity.<br /><br />Fourth, I've seen participation from the "big three" (Lotus, Microsoft, Novell) of enterprise products on the lists (although they may not be members of the consortium yet).<br /><br />Fifth, and most importantly - there are what appear to be many more university and open-source (the two sets often overlap) developers interested and contributing. <br /><br />When a critical mass of developers on the Web decide to work on something, rapid progress is often made. In this case, I believe enough interest has been generated in "the calendaring problem" to move us much closer to the goal of true calendar interoperability. We can only hope.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1111296882507109722005-03-20T00:00:00.000-05:002005-03-20T00:34:42.516-05:00They're missing out on opportunities, and money too!Most of the big players in the calendaring & scheduling world have <span style="font-weight:bold;">some</span> support for the iCalendar standards (<a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt">RFC2445</a> at least, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2446.txt">RFC2446/iTIP</a> and <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2447.txt">RFC2447/iMIP</a> to some degree). Some have better support than others. What all of them are missing, of course, is good interoperation with their competitor's products.<br /><br />I'm making an educated guess, after three decades in computer work, that the vendors are afraid of true interoperation. The marketing guys reason that if their product is interchangable with someone else's, which would be true if the interoperation parts worked, they don't have a hold on you and you'll just switch out for something cheaper. They're wrong. Some people <span style="font-weight:bold;">will</span> switch out for cheaper stuff, but usually that's a fairly small minority. People want software that <span style="font-weight:bold;">works</span> for them, and more often than not will continue to use one vendor's software for years <span style="font-weight:bold;">if</span> it works well enough. So, the majority of people who switch do it because the other product wasn't getting the job done, or it was doing the job badly, or in some other way interfering with business or personal life. <br /><br />Now we're reaching a point where a lot of interaction <span style="font-weight:bold;">between</span> businesses and people (or other businesses) takes place across interconnected networks. Nearly everyone reading this communicates via e-mail. Everyone uses different e-mail programs, but they all can send messages to each other, because the e-mail programs comply with some standards to make that happen. If you're a computer support person, you know that it's complex and hairy stuff that makes it work, there are bugs and flaws and arcane things going on in those standards. But if you're just a regular user of e-mail, you don't know, or care. You send e-mail, and Uncle Fred gets it. That's all you care about.<br /><br />You can't, however, handle scheduling a meeting, or a birthday dinner appointment with Uncle Fred that way. Your calendar program might, if you're lucky, be able to send an invitation to ol' Fred; but his calendar program might not understand it. You might want to schedule a meeting between you, Spacely Sprockets, and Cogswell Cogs, but you can't do it, and you lose some valuable time playing telephone tag to set up the meeting. <br /><br />Wouldn't you, then, pay a little bit of money to get a program which could "talk" to other calendar programs? Or wouldn't you stay loyal to a program which allowed you to do those things? I know I would, and I think you would too. That's why I believe that calendar interoperation will <span style="font-weight:bold;">increase</span> sales, rather than lose customers. And if the companies making this software don't believe that, then they're going to lose money as their customers move to buy software from companies that do believe it.<br /><br />No company ever went broke selling its customers what they want to buy. I believe that the time has come where we want to buy calendar ease-of-use. I hope the Microsofts, Palms, and IBMs of this world believe it too.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1109309206223881862005-02-25T00:17:00.000-05:002005-02-25T00:26:46.223-05:00So, it's been a while...I haven't posted in some time, probably because not a lot has happened in the calendar world. There's been a new Calendar Interop by <a href="http://www.calconnect.org">the Calendaring & Scheduling Consortium</a> which included the first-ever interop for <a href="http://ietf.webdav.org/caldav">CalDav</a>, a superset of WebDav which has some calendar folks excited. This Interop didn't include some of the previous participants, so I'm not sure how much progress is/was being made.<br /><br />On another front, today there were suddenly rumors of Google Calendar (for one such post see <a href="http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004282.html">Jeremy Zawadony's post</a>), based on Google crawling for iCalendar (or Apple iCal, depending upon who you ask) data. This may be a manifestation not of a GCalendar application, but possibly of a specialized search for calendar information - which in and of itself would probably be a helpful thing. I suppose we'll know soon enough.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1103344471872099652004-12-17T23:14:00.000-05:002004-12-17T23:34:31.873-05:00Another start on the path to calendar nirvana..The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium had its public launch (see the press release <a href="http://www.calconnect.org/pr041214.pdf">here</a>) this week. There are quite a group of people involved - including some very experienced and/or smart ones. It looks promising, but we've seen promise before in the calendaring world, promise in the "candidate campaign promise" sense which disappears soon after the election. I'm always optimistic that <b>this time</b> will be the time things change, but who can be sure at this point?
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<br />There are at least two big vendors missing from the founder's list, who ought to be ashamed of themselves - Microsoft, because of the prevalence of Outlook in organizations; and Palm, because they're basically the progenitors of personal information management in the mobile space. Come on guys, it will only help you sell more copies if people can use your tool to schedule with all of their partners! The only mobile vendor I see is Symbian.. are they the stand-in for all of the cell-phone companies? When everyone claims we'll be living and dying by the cell phone, why aren't more cell phone software firms working with this group?
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<br />There are, at least, several universities involved - while their scheduling needs may not be the same as Everyman's, they do tend to have a lot of bright student programmers who like to work on things..
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<br />The group's purpose though is admirable, and one I support whole-heartedly (it's the purpose of this blog, too): to push vendors to come up with even <b>some</b> decent interoperability so that we can finally use our calendaring tools with businesses, with customers, and with each other. If we can get there, the door will open to all sorts of helpful calendar-related applications in the future, too. Let's just hope we get there.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1102994354303827002004-12-13T21:48:00.000-05:002004-12-13T22:24:18.750-05:00Calendars everywhere, someday!Imagine this... you search for an event - your favorite band's concert in your city, a public hearing, your second cousin from Poughkeepsie's birthday. When you find it, with a simple click you add it to your own calendar. That's one of the great potential benefits of calendar standards, which we could do today, except that web authoring tools don't support the iCalendar standard. It's hard enough to get calendar vendors to support it, so that's not unexpected, but it <b>is</b> pretty simple to do.
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<br />All that is necessary is for the web authoring tool to create a small iCalendar (.ics) file for each calendar-type event, and add an anchor tag that references that file. Actually, iCalendar files can contain multiple events but let's keep it simple for this discussion. Then when a user clicks on the file, it is opened in whatever application supports .ics files (MIME type "text/calendar"). It works with Apple's iCal program, and I hear with Outlook (I don't have Outlook so I don't know for sure). It currently won't work with Palm's Desktop program, because that only supports the older and outdated vCalendar specification.
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<br />Here's an iCalendar example with a small add-to-calendar icon:
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<br /><a href="http://home.comcast.net/%7Eblooflame/Newyear.ics"><img src="http://home.comcast.net/%7Eblooflame/addcal.jpg" />Watch Dick Clark (iCalendar)</a>
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<br />And for Palm Desktop users, the vCalendar version
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<br /><a href="http://home.comcast.net/%7Eblooflame/Newyear.vcs"><img src="http://home.comcast.net/%7Eblooflame/addcal.jpg" />Watch Dick Clark (vCalendar)</a>
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<br />Try one of them, and see how it works for you. Now, imagine doing that for any event information that you now have to copy and re-type into your personal calendar - wouldn't life be easier?
<br />Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1101782683362166332004-11-29T21:37:00.000-05:002004-11-29T21:44:43.363-05:00Just to show I'm not just prejudiced against PalmI've got problems with Lotus Notes, too. Notes is what we use at work, currently. In general it works okay, but iCalendar support is spotty or odd in some ways. You can't click on and open an iCalendar file on the web for example (in Notes 6 anyway, we're not using 6.5 yet); you have to drag it to your in-basket. From there, it's like a meeting invitation, you have to open it in your in-box, then perform another action to add it to your calendar. This of course makes adding events from someone else's site to your calendar a pain. It's not as much of a pain as Palm's non-support of iCalendar, but a pain none the less. I've heard it will be fixed in 6.5 or 7.0, but I have no confirmation of that.
<br />Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1098150786240943502004-10-18T21:34:00.000-04:002004-10-31T14:29:58.733-05:00Why doesn't Palm get it?Look, I'm not going to claim that iCalendar is the absolute best calendar data format there is. It has issues and problems just like other Internet quasi-standards. But it's what we've got, and I just don't understand why some vendors don't at least provide <u>partial</u> support for it!
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<br />Case in point: PalmSource. Since the split, they are the "owners" of Palm Desktop, as near as I can tell. iCalendar has been in existence since around 1998, yet Palm Desktop <u>still</u> cannot open, import or export iCalendar files. They can handle vCalendar files, to a point, but not iCalendar. Since opening iCalendar files would be a major boon- several sites post iCalendar versions of sports schedules, holidays, and the like, I decided to write them to ask for this enhancement.
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<br />First, finding where to write was a hassle - I ended up posting a bug report (Palm Desktop does not open iCalendar files) and also sending an e-mail to an address I found somewhere on their site, or PalmOne's; I can't even find that again! Second, all I've received since July was an acknowledgement e-mail basically restating my request!
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<br />It's not like it's rocket science for them either! They can open iCalendar files in e-mail in the PalmOS (but I don't browse with my PDA!), so they must have the code to handle it. Also, I didn't really ask for the whole iCalendar enchilada, anyway. All I asked was that they support iCalendar to the degree that they support vCalendar- I want to be able to open an iCalendar file with fixed events and add them to my calendar. This would be a very minimal set of iCalendar components and properties - in fact, I bet if you took a vCalendar file, added METHOD: PUBLISH, maybe a DTSTAMP, and changed the VERSION to 2.0 it would work.
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<br />So, Palm, what's the hold up? Not enough programmers to do a 5 minute change that would save hundreds of hours of customer time? Maybe it's more important to support cameraphone and MP3 operation than people who might want to actually use PIM features that you sell? Have you forgotten your roots? And even if I'm wrong, <u>write me and tell me so!</u> - the case ID number at PalmOne support is 200672; I can't find the bug report on your site, so you'll have to look for it yourselves.
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<br /><strong>UPDATE</strong>: When I posted about adding a METHOD: and DTSTAMP: above - that would solve output from Palm Desktop to iCalendar. I tested it by exporting a file to vCalendar and making those modifications, then sending it to my Lotus Notes account at work, and it was indeed usable. Going from iCalendar into Palm Desktop would be slightly more difficult - their code would have to ignore any iCalendar things it couldn't deal with, which is easy enough, but there might be incompatible versions of things like RRULE: for recurring instances that have to be handled. Even so, they have the code to do it in the Palm OS, so they don't have to invent it from scratch.
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<br /><strong>UPDATE #2:</strong> on 10/25/2004 I received a Palm customer support satisfaction survey about this problem which showed "Close date: 10/19/2004", the day after the original post. Of course, I told them I wasn't satisfied, since all they had done so far was restate my problem. We'll see what happens.
<br />Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1097723704115182822004-10-13T23:08:00.000-04:002004-10-13T23:15:04.116-04:00More rants on the lack of calendaring for the InternetIn the course of posting to a calendaring mailing-list, it hit me - it's been somewhere between 10 and 14 years that I've been around office/calendaring software, and we <u>still</u> cannot reliably schedule meetings between two organizations that use different software, let alone use a tool to schedule an appointment with the dentist, the barber, a real estate showing, or any of the other things one wants to schedule!
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<br />There <u>is</u> a group trying to come out with a simplification of the iCalendar (RFC2445) and iTIP (RFC2446) protocols to allow this to happen. Hope we get it worked out.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1096752121953785572004-10-02T17:11:00.000-04:002004-10-02T17:22:01.953-04:00Play That Funky Music - But When?Ever try looking up the touring schedule of a favorite band, or the game schedule of your favorite sports team, on the Web? What a hodge-podge of calendaring information. Some list dates and locations only, some include the time. Some are simple lists, others are arranged visually like a calendar. In some cases, you can click on the item to do other things or get a better description of things, but in almost <u>no</u> case can you click on the item and add it to your own calendar. This would be such a natural thing for them to do for their customers, and we'd all really appreciate it, too; but I guess there isn't enough profit in it.
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<br />Still, I am working on something like that in my spare time, which I hope to spread around to various bands and such. It will be XML-based probably, and will allow each item to have a link that downloads a calendar item into whatever calendar you use on your computer. I haven't worked out all of the details for what to do if you use a web-based calendar tool, but it should be similar. If it catches on, or at least if the <u>concept</u> catches on, someday soon we'll be able to add that concert by the Nine-or-Tenors to our calendar when we buy the tickets, and we'll be on our way to having our schedules improved in the way that e-mail and/or IM have improved our communications (without the spam I hope).
<br />Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8451853.post-1095999684026497722004-09-23T23:59:00.000-04:002004-10-02T17:04:32.380-04:00It's Time!Why can't we schedule a dentist's appointment with the dentists' computer, while avoiding conflicts with work events and home events? Calendaring software has existed for at least a decade, yet the tools to let my calendar talk to the dentist's calendar have been a long time coming. Why is that, you ask?
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<br />The answer, I feel, is two-fold:
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<br />First, calendaring is more complicated than it looks on the surface. Timezones, for example, are a huge complication, especially for people who have meetings in zones other than where they live. Describing recurring appointments in compact way is another.
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<br />Secondly, all the people who have developed this kind of software have done it more-or-less in isolation. That means that there are a lot of different ways of doing things, and making them work together means finding some common ground. There are some standards (see <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt?number=2445">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt?number=2445</a>, <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2446.txt?number=2446">http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2446.txt?number=2446</a>) but implementations of the standards differ. And all of the vendors of commercial software, of course, want their implementations to be accomodated in any interoperability scheme and they are sometimes intractable about what concessions they'll make.
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<br />How do we get this fixed? I think that it's going to take a lot of concerted pressure from users of the various calendaring products. Demand that your calendar be able to work with your friends', clients', customers' or suppliers' calendars, not matter what they use. Try not to buy calendar software that limits you (vendors react to the money thing more than just about anything else). Make it clear that a working calendar doesn't just keep track of your time, but enough of everyone else's, too, to let you schedule things smoothly.
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<br />Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14664456134377708441noreply@blogger.com0