Where is the Killer Calendar? 725
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?"
Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
Korganizer (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Kontact (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:1, Informative)
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. And it integrates into open source like a mug.
If you're ever at a Mac store, try it out. You might find you like it.
PDA, actually (Score:2, Informative)
And, if it doesn't do something that I need, I'll write something that does.
Mozilla Calendar and Lightning (Score:5, Informative)
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 [e-gandalf.net].
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.
Re:iCal (Score:2, Informative)
Re:iCal (Score:2, Informative)
Horde Kronolith (Score:5, Informative)
Event Sherpa is a bit like iCal for Windows (Score:1, Informative)
Re:For OS X: Entourage 2004 (Score:3, Informative)
And for people that graduated from College and are in the real world (and the people that didn't go to college), some larger companies have a deal with Microsoft to let you get MS Office for cheap. You'll again have to talk with your IT department or whoever, to see if your company is enrolled in the "Home Use Program". https://hup.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]
I just ordered Office 2004 from the Home Use Program... and it is showing as "Backordered" on my order status now. >
gTodo (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:1, Informative)
Birthdays however don't budge
Rainlendar - Lightweight Calendar/ToDo (Score:2, Informative)
-Ares
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, I'm open to try it, but I don't have a machine capable of running it. I've been Windows Free for quite a while now.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
My Wife (Score:2, Informative)
I suppose some of you have a secretary that does the same, but the beauty I married is a beast when it comes to reminders, and I'll bet there's none better!
Project / Task Management Software (Score:3, Informative)
I have been meaning to ask this question to the community here for a while.
I am looking for good task management software. And I haven't seen anything yet that does what I need. Please let me explain.
I'm a project manager and Architect (software development) with 5 direct reports and an Offshore Team which I co-manage with others. It's a large project...30 people, over 4 years.
At any given time I have approx 125 tasks out there, for myself and my team. I have been having a hard time keeping track of stuff using excel and pen and paper.
I've considered writing the software I need (possibly in perl/perltk/mysql) but I don't have the time.
I'm looking for something more flexible than MS Outlook...which is way too simple, but not as top heavy as MS project (which I use for long term planning...but does not really do what I need for task management).
I should be able to assign a task with:
-5 levels of priority
-Task description
-Status (not yet assigned, assigned, in progress, cancelled, hold, late, completed)
-Proposed start and end dates
-Actual start and end dates
-Assign primary responsibility, backup, and off responsible helper
-Task due to (group or individual)
-Category (by my definition)
-Sub-category (by my definition)
-Status comments (by date)
It should have the ability to assign subtasks to a task... for example, task 10, which is a UAT release, is dependant on task 15 which is a daatabase refresh assigned to our DBA. This requirement sounds like MS Project but I really don't need top heavy project plannig software in this case... just task management.
Yhe tool should be able to generate reports and
I should also be able to program it with a simple schedule, say a schedule of software releases and I should get reminders of what's coming up in the next X period of time.
I am sure that someone else has needed this level of detail and control, and has this problem already solved. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
wbs.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
'Hope that helps. have a nice day.'
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
(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 (Score:3, Informative)
The Best (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I use my PDA (Score:3, Informative)
Even better, to my mind, is that Linux (thus probably OS X, not sure) has a clone of Palm Desktop software: jpilot!
That program does everything I need it to do: to-do list, address book, calendar...
And it syncs with any Palm PDA. I love it, and wish there was one for windows.
Outlook seriously bugs me, though I know that Jpilot doesn't have anything close to an Exchange server (because the PDAs don't use them to start with).
So for small needs, a PDA, or PDA syncing app will do just fine!
Make Acrobat load quickly! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make Acrobat load quickly! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:4, Informative)
the Exchange Team told me that the servers were never meant to have their time changed. Microsoft handles time changes on the client side (meaning windows) so windows adjusts the time for you and that reflects on the Outlook
Re:Project / Task Management Software (Score:2, Informative)
The closest thing I've found in current software is ShadowPlan (codejedi.com). It runs on Palm Pilots. There is a desktop version, but it is incomplete.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
oh dear, no go"
File -> Open Location.
Seems to work fine to me, you can also drag the URL from another application.
Re:Korganizer (Score:3, Informative)