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What is the Best Calendar?
An anonymous reader writes "In the flurry of AJAX applications being put to market, Google's new calendar has been getting quite a bit of attention. But being drowned out in this media blitz is Kiko, a startup from Paul Graham's Y Combinator program, along with spongecell, Trumba, Yahoo! calendar, and 30boxes. Which do you prefer?" Update: 04/16 14:55 GMT by Z : YCombinator link fixed.
No doubt about it.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I've got a sexy Drew Barrymore calander which works for me.
http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/ It's stable and it does everything a web calendar should do.
I like iCal. Of all the calendars listed, iCal works the best when I'm in an airport and I don't want to spend $8 for Internet access during a 1-hour layover. :)
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I would prefer any calender that integrates properly with my email client. Why is that so difficult? If I receive an invitation (from Outlook Express or Evolution or what not), I want to be able to accept it right there, without saving it first and then importing it into the calender.
Mozilla Calendar cannot do it, Yahoo Mail fails the test, even Gmail does not integration (or I haven't figure out how to switch it on). The only program that really does this is evolution (and of course Outlook). For all the other, it should be back to the drawing board.
I prefer a 3-tier calendar, with standard presentation protocols in the UI layer (iCal, vCal, etc), arbitrary logic in the logic layer, and any storage server I want in the storage layer (RDBMS, filesystem, etc). Each in a separate component, with standard interfaces. I like Open-Xchange, open source, Java, Postgres, many APIs. But even OX has problems, like a contacts DB ghettoized in a separate BerkeleyDB storage layer for its OpenLDAP server, rather than storing it in the same Postgres. All these apps should have completely discrete components, with minimum functional redundancy, and easily addable objects (in Java, Perl, C/C++, whatever) that can access every API and dataflow. Since there are so many calendar clients, calendaring needs that utility the most.
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make install -not war
I've been hammering through this problem for the last 5 years, trying to find a group scheduling and calendaring application that has the capabilities of Exchange. It's important to note that there is a big difference between 'calendaring' apps (such as 30boxes and Yahoo Calendar and the like), and 'scheduling', where an interactive application can review a persons or groups schedule, and then add things to their calendar.
As far as I've been able to tell, nothing does the group scheduling other than Exchange in any decent form. The best most can do is publish ICS files into a public server, and then make them available for public browsing (say, via phpicalendar), or available for remote subscription (which Evolution, et al supports).
The golden calf for opensource would be an application that supports client-server group calendaring and scheduling, with PDA synchronizing, and multi-platform support. The only thing even remotely moving in this direction is CalDAV, which AFAICT, is moving at a glacial pace.
Until this problem is resolved, there is no defense against "Why don't we just use Exchange for this?"
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
Pencil and paper :-)
...is seriously the best calendaring solution I have come across. It provides a mini languages for recording virtually every possible repetition and exception patterns of recurring appointments (next to storing unique appointments of course), prints out reminders or tabular calendars on the terminal or outputs nicely formatted postscript calendars. And all its functionality is packed into a lean 100k executable. If you don't like noting appointments in its markup language, you can use the program "wyrd" as an interactive, terminal-visual frontend. "remind" is a BSD program and part of all free BSD and Linux distributions. If you install it on a server, you use it via ssh. Implementing a web frontend should be trivial, too.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
My opinion is that it doesn't much matter which calendar you you. I've tried a bunch of them (Google Calendar, Palm Desktop, Sunbird, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Groupwise, Plaxo, etc...) and the problem isn't typically with a given calendar's capabilities. The problem is that they don't work with each other, especially if you want to use a PDA. Palm Desktop is incompatible with Outlook which is incompatible with Sunbird, etc... Most third party software seems to be written with Outlook/Exchange in mind. iCal is a nice "standard" but it has a minority of marketshare and hence doesn't get enough developer attention. Furthermore, MS isn't about to open up Outlook or Exchange to help matters. Your employer problably uses a different calendar than mine which makes life difficult if you are a consultant or simply have chosen a different calendar for your own use than your company's standard.
I have a Palm Tungsten T3 but it's not very useful because I have to maintain 2-3 incompatible calendars to keep it useful. Import/Export is simply not a solution unless you are changing calendars and dumping the old one. Google Calendar is nice but it doesn't efficiently exchange data with my desktop calendar, work calendar and pda. It's got potential but but we'll see where it goes. Few/none of the calendar makers have shown any inclination to work together so far (customer lock in and all that) so I'm not optimistic.
I haven't explored all of the available calendars, but I've tried a few. My biggest problem with all of the ones I've tried thus far is that they try to replicate the 'boxes in a grid' design of paper calendars. I would prefer to see someone come up with a calendar that uses a list view, so I can always see by default a four-week view, with all of the dates laid out vertically.
I would find it much more efficient to look at dates that are stacked vertically, so I can scroll up or scroll down through the year. Weeks could be delineated by simple horizontal lines, and months by lightly shaded background colors.
Boxes truncate long words and are particularly inefficient for screen display, because the resolution of computer screens is so crappy compared to the resolution and flexibility of pen and paper. Providing a single long horizontal space for all the information relating to a day would be much more advantageous.
Adding more and more features to a flawed paradigm is simply annoying to me. Give me a layout that works, before adding all kinds of Ajax. Think outside the box (sorry, I had to say it).
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