Where is the Killer Calendar?

AnonaCow writes "Firefox and Thunderbird rock my world, but Mozilla's Calendar (Sunbird) has a long way to go. This maybe mundane, but what software does the slashdot community use to schedule? How do you keep track of your various appointments? What about your 'To Do' List?"

Comments

Outlook 2003

[timothv]

Outlook 2003, which has best calendar/todo interface I've seen.

Re:Outlook 2003

[ciroknight]

I'd have to argue.

iCal is not only 100% less bloated, it's also much easier to track things like to-do lists, and have multiple, overlapping schedules. In combination with using an open standard, it's easy to publish your calenders and keep track of everything. And it integrates into open source like a mug.

If you're ever at a Mac store, try it out. You might find you like it.

Re:Outlook 2003

[gessel]

Does anyone who ever worked on Outlook ever get on a plane? Ever? Do they know what a time zone is?

There is only one program I've found that handles time zones correctly: TrueSync Desktop and it is abandonware. I kept buying motorola P8167s for years just so I could stick with TSD.

There are two features of TrueSync Desktop that no other PIM seems to do correctly, and there is only one correct method. The two features are:

1) When you create an standard event, you specify the time zone the event will happen in. All time zone math is handled automatically. This is the only correct method of handling events for people who travel outside their time zone regularly.

2) When you mark a special day, say a birthday or a holiday, TSD remembers the date, rather than creating a 24 hour event from 0:00 to 23:59. This is the only correct way to handle special days.

Consider the following scenarios, which I face almost every week:

A) You are in California on the phone with someone in Boston planning a phone conference from 10:00-11:30am for next week at which time you'll be in London. What time should you set the conference for? Can you do the math? How about if you're in Phoenix in April? There are 31 time zones and almost all contain some regions that observe and some that do not observe DST. This is the sort of irritating arithmetic my computer should do, and only True Sync Desktop does it the right way.

With Outlook can set your system time zone to the time zone the event will happen in, then create the event, then set your time zone back to the time zone you're in. Oh yeah, that's really convenient.

B) You make a new friend on a visit a trip that includes a visit to Hawaii and Boston and put her birthday in your outlook/phone tools calendar. You get to San Francisco. What day is her birthday? With outlook when you change time zones the event straddles two days, only one of them the actual correct day. Depending on whether you travel east or west, the correct date is either the first or the second of the two days marked. How flabbergastingly stupid is that?

Now one would think that _someone_ (anyone) involved in the development of outlook would, sooner or later, actually travel to a different time zone and realize just how utterly brain dead their handling of time zones really is (yes, outlook supports two (2)whole time zones, and for purely bicoastal people that's fine, but some of us actually travel to the flyover states occasionally. And some people even travel outside the US, which is still legal.)

I personally can't stand the outlook look and feel. I find it sort of smothering, though I acknowledge that there are some good features to it, but if there's one good model for how a PIM should work it's True Sync Desktop, but since it won't sync to a modern phone, it's just not all that useful anymore, sadly.

Thanks to my incessant whining, BVRP has put time zones on it's feature path, so Motorola's PhoneTools might soon correctly implement time zones and all-day events, probably more quickly if more people encourage them to.

Re:Outlook 2003

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about Outlook but iCal can do the first. You can setup as many time zones as you want and they show up in the top right corner of the windows. So when you set up the meeting for california, you just change the timezone to the west coast. add it at 10am. Then when you switch back to your time zone it will show it at the right time for you. Same thing for London. Just switch it to london and all your events timeshift so your 10am meeting becomes a 6pm one in the calendar.

Birthdays however don't budge

Re:Outlook 2003

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I have exactly the same timezone handling requirement and surprisingly, the evolution calendar does it right. You can set separate timezones for the beginning and end of an event, which I particularly like for entering flights with the "local times" listed on the airline itinerary. You can also trivially change your timezone for viewing the calendar, independently of the timezone for your computer/shell environment.

I've been using it for years now (since my reliable calendar stopped being supported on RedHat). They seem to have shaken most of the annoying bugs out of its time handling in the past few releases that are bundled with Fedora Core. What irritates me is that evolution wants so badly to be a suite when I just want a damn calendar to go with my fetchmail+procmail+sa+mutt+rsync+ssh+xterm distributed mail handling gyrations.

Re:Outlook 2003

[ciroknight]

I've used Outlook 2k1. Unless the entire product has gone and done a COMPLETE 180 degrees, new design team, less code bloat, less confusing options and hard to set up nothings, I doubt if it's gotten any better.

That being said, I'm open to try it, but I don't have a machine capable of running it. I've been Windows Free for quite a while now.

Re:Outlook 2003

[UnderScan]

I agree that OSS could certainly be better, but how about recognizing something like KDE? KDE could use better defaults but there are activly working on improving that. As for the design, libraries, & performance, have you heard that like OS X, KDE gets faster on the same hardware with every new release? Did you also know that KDE uses compontenized & modularized (I am killing the spelling) KIOslaves & KParts which help to expose functionallity to every KDE app which reduces redundancy & waste. If a new KPart or KIOslave is created for 1 app, it can be used by all apps. This is how you open a text file from a remote system in the Kate editor by pointing the Open dialog to ftp://ftp.system.com/directory/file.txt.

Also note that your complaint about bloat falls on the deaf ears of comercial/propreitary software devs too. Close source apps are bloating up all the time. Think of how much redundancy is used even in MS apps when Office XP or 2k3, Visual Studio, Media player, & normal apps use different libraries which provide different GUI widgets & controls. How about Adobe Acrobat? They finally heard the collective complains about that bloated POS & v7 is quick to load up. Now only if they could retroactively make v5 & v6 quicker.

Re:Outlook 2003

[killjoe]

I could not disagree more. It's bloated, overly complex, has options buried 15 clicks deep, slow as hell, and really gives you no more functionality then dozens of other PIMs on the market for the windows platform. I used to be forced to use it at work, I am so glad I don't work there anymore.

Re:Outlook 2003

[circusboy]

sigh... Some people just don't know their pop music...

'Hope that helps. have a nice day.'

Re:Outlook 2003

[swmccracken]

You've not been using Outlook 2003 in the recommended Cached Exchange Mode. We are - and it makes PST files look quaint. :-)

(In cached mode, Outlook "merely" synchronises against Exchange. Everything is stored in both places - meaning that nothing on the client has to be backed up, you only have to back-up the store on the Exchange server. This is easy to do - just use NTBACKUP to generate a BKF file - you don't even shut the server down. Also, since you only have to protect the server, you'll often use a decent RAID setup to reduce the chance the backup will ever be needed.)

If a workstation falls over, you reinstall outlook and set up the account. It just downloads everything back from the server and you're up and running.

It also sounds like you have an information managment problem - people's outlook account is not really where you should be storing important corporate information.

Re:Outlook 2003

[mr. methane]

For those who use the Treo, there's an app called "versamail" (I think) which sync's the palm calendar with outlook as well. It's not real-time, but pretty close to it (I think mine is set for hourly updates.)

Re:Outlook 2003

[exKingZog]

You can make PST files bigger than 2Gb with Outlook 2003. However, if you're connected to an Exchange Server back-end then you're no longer using PST files except maybe as a personal archive. (That said, they're still a pain...)

Re:Outlook 2003

[halo8]

I can answer this because i had another customer with this exact same case 2 weeks ago

the Exchange Team told me that the servers were never meant to have their time changed. Microsoft handles time changes on the client side (meaning windows) so windows adjusts the time for you and that reflects on the Outlook

Re:Outlook 2003

[unapersson]

"how am I going to open a remote image with gimp ?

oh dear, no go"

File -> Open Location.

Seems to work fine to me, you can also drag the URL from another application.

Korganizer

[hardaker]

I use Korganizer synced with a palm for my scheduling. It works quite well. Like any piece of software, it's far from perfect. But I'm continually impressed with what I can pull off with it. I really like being able to link in other schedules as well and have them available from a checkbox to display them or not. I have the fedora release schedule pulled from HTTP, my wifes schedule copied to my machine hourly from hers... Lets me quickly overlay multiple things.

To make sure I look at it, my login session opens it whenever I log into my machine (and I do shutdown nightly just to start clean though it's hardly necessary). A cron job to open it every morning would be just as helpful.

Obviously, this needs at least some level of KDE installed.

Kontact

[InodoroPereyra]

The answer for me is easy: kontact. I use all the components, including KMail. It syncs the Calendar, TODO list, etc., perfectly with my PDA (a Sony Clie).

PDA, actually

[mkswap-notwar]

Actually, I still use my PDA. It's very flexible, not tied to whatever OS I'm booted into at the moment, and does everything you inquired about.

And, if it doesn't do something that I need, I'll write something that does.

Mozilla Calendar and Lightning

[helix400]

Sunbird is currently undergoing a complete rewrite. I've worked with early builds of the new Sunbird, and it's looking pretty nice. Eventually, it should emerge with a much better framework to handle many Calendar and scheduling needs.

Mozilla Lightning is also doing well in development. You can see some screenshots of it here (may load slowly): http://diary.e-gandalf.net/?p=35.

It seems like these developers finally understand the great need for Calendar products. I frequently hear discussion of the most wanted features, such as different calendar formats, integration with other handhelds, etc.

Re:iCal

[mr100percent]

hear hear. I can even publish it to web, and sync it to my other Macs and Palm, and let others subscribe to it in their iCals.

Re:iCal

[mr100percent]

iPod and Palm syncing too!

Horde Kronolith

[egburr]

www.horde.org See the kronolith project It's what I use for web-based email, calendar, address book, and more on my home server, and is available anywhere I have access to a web browser.

Event Sherpa is a bit like iCal for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Oooh, they seem to de going through some "restructuring". You can still download Sherpa here IIRC it can read/write .ics files

Re:For OS X: Entourage 2004

[Necroman]

It seems like most major universities have some kind of deal with Microsoft to let students buy Office for cheap. Most of the time you can check with your schools IT department to see if your school is part of the program. And sometimes the school isn't part of the program, but individual colleges within the university are enrolled in the program. (The Computer Science dept I went through had the Microsoft agreement before the entire school did).

And for people that graduated from College and are in the real world (and the people that didn't go to college), some larger companies have a deal with Microsoft to let you get MS Office for cheap. You'll again have to talk with your IT department or whoever, to see if your company is enrolled in the "Home Use Program". https://hup.microsoft.com/

I just ordered Office 2004 from the Home Use Program... and it is showing as "Backordered" on my order status now. >

gTodo

[cappaberra]

If you use gnome and haven't tried gTodo yet, you're missing out on the simplest/cleanest todo list program ever written... check it out!

Rainlendar - Lightweight Calendar/ToDo

[ares284]

Personally I use Rainlendar. It looks cool, has a light footprint, and just plain works. It's Windows-only, though =\


-Ares

My Wife

[HexaByte]

Seriously, I never have to boot up to see what there is to do next, (some times she gives me the boot to get me going!), and she has this knack of being able to track me down and remind me of things no matter how far I am from a computer.

I suppose some of you have a secretary that does the same, but the beauty I married is a beast when it comes to reminders, and I'll bet there's none better!

Project / Task Management Software

[wideBlueSkies]

All,

I have been meaning to ask this question to the community here for a while.

I am looking for good task management software. And I haven't seen anything yet that does what I need. Please let me explain.

I'm a project manager and Architect (software development) with 5 direct reports and an Offshore Team which I co-manage with others. It's a large project...30 people, over 4 years.

At any given time I have approx 125 tasks out there, for myself and my team. I have been having a hard time keeping track of stuff using excel and pen and paper.

I've considered writing the software I need (possibly in perl/perltk/mysql) but I don't have the time.

I'm looking for something more flexible than MS Outlook...which is way too simple, but not as top heavy as MS project (which I use for long term planning...but does not really do what I need for task management).

I should be able to assign a task with:
-5 levels of priority
-Task description
-Status (not yet assigned, assigned, in progress, cancelled, hold, late, completed)
-Proposed start and end dates
-Actual start and end dates
-Assign primary responsibility, backup, and off responsible helper
-Task due to (group or individual)
-Category (by my definition)
-Sub-category (by my definition)
-Status comments (by date)

It should have the ability to assign subtasks to a task... for example, task 10, which is a UAT release, is dependant on task 15 which is a daatabase refresh assigned to our DBA. This requirement sounds like MS Project but I really don't need top heavy project plannig software in this case... just task management.

Yhe tool should be able to generate reports and .csv files. For example : report of what's due for completion this week, or everything of priority 1 that is late to the clients)

I should also be able to program it with a simple schedule, say a schedule of software releases and I should get reminders of what's coming up in the next X period of time.

I am sure that someone else has needed this level of detail and control, and has this problem already solved. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
wbs.

Re:Project / Task Management Software

[gsyswerda]

What you are looking for is Ecco Pro. It was discontinued years ago, but there is still an avid support group.

The closest thing I've found in current software is ShadowPlan (codejedi.com). It runs on Palm Pilots. There is a desktop version, but it is incomplete.

The Best

[SysJames]

The best one is: ECCO. A free abondonware from NetManage. Available free at: ftp://ftp.netmanage.com/support/pub/utilities/EC40 1/Ecco32/. For windows only currently, but in the process of going open source.

Re:I use my PDA

[Goeland86]

you are right that the PDA is the best.
Even better, to my mind, is that Linux (thus probably OS X, not sure) has a clone of Palm Desktop software: jpilot!
That program does everything I need it to do: to-do list, address book, calendar...
And it syncs with any Palm PDA. I love it, and wish there was one for windows.
Outlook seriously bugs me, though I know that Jpilot doesn't have anything close to an Exchange server (because the PDAs don't use them to start with).
So for small needs, a PDA, or PDA syncing app will do just fine!

Make Acrobat load quickly!

[Frodo Crockett]

You can make Acrobat load very quickly by removing most of the plugins. Go to your Acrobat install directory and create a new sub-directory called 'plugins_suck'. Move every file except for 'EWH32.api' and 'search.api' out of the 'plugins' directory into the new 'plugins_suck' directory. Presto! Fast load times for Acrobat.

Re:Make Acrobat load quickly!

[tsa]

I read somewhere on /. that you can also press the shift key during startup. It then skips all the plugins and loads in the blink of an eye. The amazing thing is that I don't find it any less usable without all these plugins.

Re:Korganizer

[d^2b]

Well, surprisingly enough, KDE is not required. There is a project call korganizer-pi (pi=platform independant) that runs without KDE. Indeed, it runs on Windows. The UI is a little less slick than the latest Korganizer, but it does e.g., allow me to sync my laptop and my zaurus to a server via ssh.