A grumpy editor's calendar search

A grumpy editor's calendar search

Posted Mar 10, 2004 14:42 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
Parent article: A grumpy editor's calendar search

I, too, miss ical quite a bit. I moved to Evo, mainly in anticipation of our corporate email infrastructure moving from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, so I could use Connector for shared calendaring. Hopefully that transition will happen sometime this year... I also, I have to admit, found ical a little buggy: it would sometimes crash on me (although I must say Evo also sometimes has problems: Evo itself hasn't crashed on me but the notifier applet does crap out, then I don't get any popup reminders). ical also had some annoying GUI misfeatures, and most egregiously its storage format was non-standard and not portable.

However, I share the grumpy editor's disappointment at the crop of calendars out there. I suppose it's like file chooser dialogs: to someone who hasn't tried to write one the interface doesn't seem like it should be that difficult. The things I miss about ical are the simple things. By far the most critical is being able to see my schedule from another system: I log in remotely from home every morning and I just want to know what time I have to be at work--I can't do that without starting Evo with remote display, which seems pretty ridiculous in itself--and I can't even start Evo from home unless I remember to shut it down before I leave work the night before, or else kill it from home in the morning. This issue may be alleviated when the Exchange shared calendaring is deployed since I could start a native Evo from home and visit my shared calendar on the Exchange server. In any event, the ability to get a quick text summary of your daily schedule via a command-line operation is critical IMO. I also greatly miss the configurability of the popup reminders: Evo's popups are not very configurable. They're also, annoyingly, a minute off: if a reminder pops up at 2:55 and I click the 5 minute snooze, I don't get the next reminder until 3:01. Instead of a "snooze" feature, which requires me to click the snooze button quickly or else adjust the snooze time, ical just had a "recurring reminder" feature which reminded me every N minutes: this is _MUCH_ more practical in real life.

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