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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?"
Nothing I've seen beats the Paper calander. Customizable notes, available with any wallpaper you could ask for, and quirky quotes available upon request. User can edit most all of the interface by writing, cutting, and/or pasting objects into the suqres and into the pictures. Beat that, Outlook 2003!
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Yeah, I'm a big open source convert but email and calendaring are so critical to what I do that I simply can't stand not having the best. Even if it is sadly a ms product. Nothing comes close to MS Outlook 2003, not even outlook XP.
That sounds nice -- have you released it to the world? If not, please do.
Well see, processor speed really has nothing to do with bloat.
This machine I'm typing on has a cool 128 MB of ram. Loading an application that requires 25 software libraries to do something as simple as sort a list or add a funky widget toolbar is not something this machine can withstand with ease. Running thin, streamlined apps is something that keeps my machine enjoyable to use.
That said, the Open Source world is far from listening to our calls to reduce bloat; instead they drive forward, coding the same application over and over, disorganized libraries, untracable dependencies, all and all just masses of code lumped together. While this bulk of code has thousands of useful features, many of them are hidden from sight behind a terminal which scares people away, and the few that make it through to the desktop are often behind clunky software libraries that people are constantly at war building and defending.
I hope this post doesn't come off as a troll because I really love and enjoy Linux and the BSDs that gracefully allowed Mac OS X to come into being, but I seriously hope that we get better at organizing our efforts as developers and software engineers and not continue forever honing our programming skills. While an app may not be perfect, it can Just Work, and we can fix the bugs as we go. For the critial apps, good design begets good implementation. We should embrace these lessons as we look to the future.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
This is all very astonishing of you, considering that later in this thread you admit that you have never actually used Outlook2k3...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
As much as I frown upon people posting without knowing all the facts, I will say this (from the perspective of someone who has dabbled in both)
iCal in theory, will always be less bloated than outlook, simply because it has a more limited feature set --- read into this however you may.
By its own nature, all iCal has to do is provide a rudiementary scheduling interface. Although the UI is beautiful and the program very useful, the future set is very basic. For people like myself who do not require the full capabilities of outlook and exchange, iCal is more than adequate. On top of iCal's very basic architecture, of course, you get neat features tacked on top such as automated reminders and web publishing.
If you work in a big company and use exchange, quite simply, that extra code bloat in outlook is going to pay off bigtime, because you're actually going to be using that "bloat" to boost productivity. If you need the advanced workgroup features of outlook/exchange, chances are you're already using it.
At the moment, for windows, Outlook 2003 appears to be the best calendaring/email application out there, regardless of wether or not you use it to its fullest extent. Although I love iCal for its simpliity and ease of use, I give major props to the MS development team for creating a damn good application. Considering the extra capabilities outlook brings to the table (wether or not they're actually necessary), Microsoft managed to do it with virtually no bloat. Outlook 2003 truly is an elegant application.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I use Evolution, and I've got to say... Outlook blows it out of the water. I like things to be free and open source, but Outlook (2003 especially) has no equal in the foss world. None. Fanboys can mod me down, but it won't change reality. Groupware and calendaring have a LONG way to go in foss.