Fitting Slashdot Into Your Schedule

droleary writes "Looking for more ways to fit the new iCal into your life, or just a way to check web site updates without it looking like you're not working? Well Subsume Technologies has just announced a cool new way to do it: wCal. You can subscribe to frequently updated calendars that are headlines of (hopefully a growing number of) web sites, including a constant-refresh-ending Slashdot: Apple calendar (the press release has the subscribe link)." I first heard of this idea from Morbus Iff back on Sept. 11, and am still not convinced of the utility, but it's an interesting idea. Maybe it will catch on.

Comments

Yet another web-based PIM?

[hlh_nospam]

I have shied away from putting my appointment calendars and client contact information on the web, and I don't see any compelling reason to start. I've already seen arbitrary changes in so-called "privacy" terms & conditions.

I would like to see something a little better than the date app than shipped with my PDA, though.

This won't help

[RedWolves2]

I spend all day reading and replying to the comments. Will this tool tell me when there is a new comment? God can you think of the bandwidth killer this could be.

Re:Use the right tool for the job: RSS

[droleary]

RSS is a much easier format to use, and there's already much easier, much better tools like Slashdock that take advantage of RSS without being unweildy (as this seems to be).

Uh, it does use the RSS feed to generate the calendar. You need only look in the ics file to see:

PRODID:com.subsume.rssCal-1.0.0a

As for the "unwieldy" comment, how cumbersome is it really to click a subscribe link? I also see an advantage to having headlines listed "as they happen" in an app that's used throughout the day instead of having to navigate Dock menus to see what's new. It all comes down to personal preference, of course, and nobody is expecting you to use a wCal if you don't want to.

Re:Overly Convoluted

[droleary]

Mixing news feeds and appointments/scheduling seems like an odd idea to me, especially if your iCal gets cluttered with updates and news from even just a few regularly updated sites.

If you've used iCal for any length of time, you'd know that individual calendars are easy to turn on and off. Additionally, if you show the search results area, everything comes out in a nice timeline list, so the visual clutter isn't necessarily a factor. The biggest usability issue I see right now is that iCal 1.0 is slow, but I'd think Apple would address that in future releases.

I'd be interested to hear exactly what your plans are for wCal

Plans? Nobody said there needed to be plans! :-)

and what you see it's primary uses as being.

The reason it initially came about is because I though it was odd that there wasn't a way to get information on new calendars from within iCal itself. Finding iCalShare has an RSS feed just clicked everything into place. Then it because a question of what other sites I could apply it to. No, it's not going to fit every site. In general, I suppose you could say I see it like the email of RSS feeds where things like SlashDock and NetNewsWire are the IRC. iCal is not as demanding of your attention; I like that.

So where to go from here? Hell if I know! It just seemed that people were only seeing calendars as something humans entered and edited, just the same way they saw sites as HTML pages before offering RSS feeds. I want light bulbs to start turning on in peoples heads and think about what else you can do with the software. No, iCal wasn't probably intended to display web site headlines, and it wasn't intended to schedule at/cron processes either, but it would sure be interesting if it could . . . :-)