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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

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.

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.

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.

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.