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

[ejdmoo]

Ditto. I even do fancy color coding. It syncs with Exchange 2003, which allows for an always up to day copy on the web and on my pocket PC phone.

MS did Exchange 2003/Outlook 2003 right.

Re:Outlook 2003

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Outlook 2003

[ciroknight]

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.

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

[Keebler71]

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.

This is all very astonishing of you, considering that later in this thread you admit that you have never actually used Outlook2k3...

Re:Outlook 2003

[ozmanjusri]

Outlook 2003 is the best calendar/to do program available for Windows.

I know I'll probably get shouted down over this, but I switched from Outlook to Lotus Notes and have never looked back. The interface is, um, idiosyncratic, but once you get used to it, it's immensely customisable, and surprisingly effective at ensuring you know what you need to know.

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

[moosesocks]

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.

Re:Outlook 2003

[NotBorg]

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

Anyone take an exchange server around the world? I maintain a few shipboard servers for the US Navy, and one thing I know (believe) is that Microsoft never intended for exchange servers to change time zones. If we update the time zone of the server, say advance it by one time zone, all scheduled events are off by an hour. The only solution we found that outlook, exchange, and some other software would work with (because they seem to have differing ideas about how to reflect the change) was to leave the time zone the same and just advance the clock.

It seems also that both exchange and outlook have some if-then blocks to deal with some time zone changing, but nether knows what the other does about it. I'm not sure if this has changed with newer versions of the software (we are several behind the current).

One would think that if the exchange server doesn't move (it usually doesn't), that outlook would work across time zone changes.

Re:Outlook 2003

[Spetiam]

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.

Re:Outlook 2003

[maxume]

If the PDA is heavier than water, you should be just fine.

pen and paper

[IEBEYEBALL]

pen and paper, and sometimes pen on the back of my hand.

Korganizer

[dangermen]

Korganizer as part of Kontact does a decent job and it actually integrates with Exchange.

Re:Korganizer

[rampant mac]

"Korganizer as part of Kontact does a decent job and it actually integrates with Exchange."

Shouldn't that be: "Korganizer Kas Kpart Kof Kontact Kdoes Ka Kdecent Kjob Kand Kit Kactually Kintegrates Kwith Kexchange."

bork bork bork?

I use my PDA

[prockcore]

Seriously. Until I can safely and securely use a remote calendar cross-platform (OSX and Linux and Windows), I'm going to stick with the PDA.

So far...

[Tavor]

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!

Re:So far...

[CausticPuppy]

Beat that, Outlook 2003!

Easy. Your method sucks at the office, when you need to schedule a meeting of about 10 people at a time when everybody is free (you need to look at THEIR calendars) and find a conference room that is available for that time period, then track RSVP's. And you have to assume that everybody else actually writes all their own appointments on their calendars.

That's a LOT of phone calls, walking around to cubicles, and collecting post-it notes. And then you're gonna wind up fighting over a room anyway with the other folks who got there first.

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.

Emacs Diary

[Greyfox]

Ow! Stop hitting me!

Seriously though, the Emacs diary is pretty flexible, can be configured to give reminders of events and actually works pretty well as long as you have emacs up all the time. I like it better than anything else I've run across. The old PalmOS diary was pretty useful, too, but my last PalmPilot died a couple of years ago and I haven't found a PDA to replace it yet. I'm thinking of writing a webapp for calendar events and hooking it up to Asterisk to call my cellphone with reminders (Use festival for TTS or something like that *vague handwave*)

For OS X: Entourage 2004

[newdamage]

I gave the Mail/iCal/Address Book combo a shot when I first bought my iBook a year ago, but it just didn't do everything I was looking for and I didn't like having to keep 3 apps open at the same time.

I've been using Entourage since Office 2004 can out for Mac. It's great, the mail client, calendar, to do list, and address book all integrate nicely. It really simplies all the things I need to do to stay organized.

While I'm not sure it's worth the high price of Office, if you can get it through a campus agreement (like I did) for under $20, I'd recommend it.

Outlook, for understanding words as well as dates

[Scott Tracy]

It's about the only PIM I've seen that can handle things like 'tomorrow', 'a week Friday' or 'next Thursday' in a date field and figure it out for you. Makes entering appointments and tasks quicker and more intuitive for me.

One I programmed myself

[Xeroc]

I actually use an organizer / to-do list that I programmed myself in PHP and Javascript (actually using AJAX!), so that I can access it and modify it anywhere in the world! (As it resides on a web server on my computer)

Re:One I programmed myself

[Bungopolis]

That sounds nice -- have you released it to the world? If not, please do.

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.

Gregorian

[macz]

I have tried them all, Julian, Aztech... you name it. But I find that Gregorian does the job with minimal fuss and a high degree of accuracy (but not so much accuracy that it is cold and unfriendly.)

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.

Re:Yahoo! Calendar

[eggoeater]

Yahoo Calendar rocks. I can access it from home and work (two different computers), it will sync up with my Palm (although the sync is a little kludgey), has a to-do list, etc., and the calendar sends me a text message (via an email address) to my cell phone to remind me of appointments.

Way fricken cool. I'll never go back to a non-web based calendar.

Re:My To Do List Is...

[__aaclcg7560]

Sure! On a Post-It Note, I write:

Morning - Read Slashdot
Afternoon - Read Slashdot
Evening - Read Slashdot

Note: Time to look for job? Not today.

Re:MOD UP!

[NanoGator]

"Using a computer for a "to-do" list or calendar is just using technology for the sake of using technology."

Generalizations always suck.