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Where is the Killer Calendar?

Posted by timothy on from the use-hired-elephants dept.

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?"

11 of 725 comments (clear)

  1. Outlook 2003 by timothv · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Outlook 2003 by ejdmoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Outlook 2003 by ciroknight · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
    3. Re:Outlook 2003 by gessel · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Outlook 2003 by UnderScan · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:Outlook 2003 by NotBorg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      I want this account deleted.
  2. Korganizer by dangermen · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  3. One I programmed myself by Xeroc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

    --
    "Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write it should be hard to understand."
    1. Re:One I programmed myself by Bungopolis · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. Gregorian by macz · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.)

    --
    ...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
  5. Re:MOD UP! by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Generalizations always suck.

    --
    "Derp de derp."