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Calendaring needs

Mike pinged me with the Google’s gonna do calendar thing on Tues am. We were just talking this weekend about the calendar issue, so I was interested. That first piece was a nice bit of speculation, but that was it, so I just turned inward to pick up the pieces of moving to iCal. Then Brendon pinged me with other bits of discussion, so now I’ll put this out.

I calendar almost everything. It helps me remember what I was doing, thinking, living then. My work calendar is completely mapped out, part of making the work of research more transparent for Tokyo (who might well question “What does she do all day?”). That was the original impetus, but I’ve adopted it as a sort of modified Personal Software Process. I simply find I accomplish what I set out to do within my original estimates as long as I keep to the schedule, since I can focus on incredibly diverse things as long as I plan for deep dives separated by periods of general work or phonecalls.

As a Windows user, I have been using categories in Outlook to manage my tasks; unfortunately the only way to get a visual indicator of task (i.e., displayed by color) was to use the proprietary (and buggy) “label” indicator. If you’re an Outlook user, this ends up being a nice feature (right click and select “label”, you can customize labels and colors). You can see it below.

When I prepared my Outlook calendar for export, I used my category-based organization to copy entries by category into new blank calendars I created. The process was rather involved (and I document the full thing here - will be uploaded when done).

I wanted to use the Moz calendar project for this first. I’ve used Moz since 1999 and last tried the calendar about two years ago. It’s come a long way since then, but still has problems. Moreover, it seems to be a huge memory hog. That’s ok, I’ll just have to get more RAM. Be prepared to deal with error messages notifying you a script will take a long time to run. Just hit “cancel” and it will continue cooking.

My 13 categories (which seems high) translated into 13 calendar files under ics. In MozCalendar (currently named Sunbird), I can toggle each one so they are viewable or not, and assign each layer a color to achieve the same effect.
Below you can see a view of my new calendar in MozCal. Horrid colors I know, but the app seems to need a restart before displaying a color change. I won’t bother with being aesthetic now.

Since I have WebDAV capabilities via my web host, Dreamhost, I can make these files available for viewing by others, and theoretically make slices available for public downloads. From this, you would just need a reader that can parse the .ics and add an event to a client calendar.

Since I haven’t really played with this before, let me try with JWZ’s ics for the DNA Lounge (actually, it’s more likely from a guy named John Adams). That will get a nice black or blood red font (I hit DNA for their fringe events). <CRASH!> Well, we’ll have to see MozSuite crashed (perhaps it is not so bad that I’ve been using Firefox as my browser while I test this out). <BANG!> A restart failed as well. Hmmm. Perhaps it is good that I got my screencaptures in while I could, folks.

But what goes on in my pc is only so interesting. The topic has gained traction out in the wild.

Jeremy Zawodny posted about this yesterday, which Brendon Wilson AIM’ed me about. Jeremy asked what features folks would want in additon to his good-start list. I added my thoughts in comments to Jeremy’s post, which I’ll reprint here (bc I’ll forget where I wrote them):

I’ve been near obsessed with this issue in the last two weeks with moving from outlook to ical and have found no easy solutions. Sorry for the long comment - repressed blog post.

Here are the client apps I’ve found in the win(dows) world: MozCal is most stable on MozSuite (I find it very slow and unstable on Firefox and Tbird). PHPical, like EventSherpa, is also gone. WebCalendar (which I’ve found cumbersome for other apps) will be my next bet.

My must-have feature requests:

• layered calendars. That’s the reason I’m moving to iCal is for the ability to layer on and off new calendars. That will fix some of the sharing-of-personal data isssue, as it addresses the rss/rdf thing by making context much more apparent (if users chose to group it in this way).
• for RSS type apps, a “click” to add to your calendar plugin for an individual event (in addition to offering the full ics)
• intelligent, mobile syncing with my treo650

As a personal solution to event tracking that uses RSS, I’m modifying a Wordpress install to publish an event feed (not live yet). I’m tangled in the code right now, but should be able to get smarter eyes on it this weekend and have it up next week.

As for demand, this is totally a scratch-my-itch thing that’s perfect for smaller groups to tackle. We don’t really need Google, but if they do it and it’s exactly what I want, that’s great (how likely is that?). However, this is about as critical as microcontent can get, and the trust barrier is very high. Local copies are still key, so it will take someone flexible enough to work across the various client apps (which really do suck).

And before we get all wound up about how complicated our technogeek lives are, we don’t have any exposure to the level of normal-land user need this is for this product. Can you imagine keeping a handle on family activities? That’s a huge pool of unmet needs. It might be free, it might be $29.95, it’s doable.

So where are we? Nothing really works. We’ve got a ton of dead projects (like what about Outport - code not updated in forever). New rants pushing people off from working on this (understandable though they are). Will Google save us? I don’t think so.

Also in the comments Technorati’s Tantek pointed to hCalendar, but I’m not sure what it means. Right now we’ve got standards around iCal, but limited implementation (except in the Apple world, and don’t think that didn’t cause me to reconsider my Treo650 vs. a nice phone-and-iPod-and-MacMini - but hell three gadgets just can’t compete). It seems like we need new implementations. And hCalendar might be an important source of both momentum and guidance.

One thing is for sure, what we’re really talking about here is search plus social networking plus synchronicity. The question we’re trying to address is how can I make the most effective use of my time? How do I find interesting ways to spend my time, with new friends, close friends, and old friends? How can I control my interests and my scheduling? How can I understand what my family is doing easily? How could I centralize and mobilize?

Let’s see what we can put together.