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?"
pen and paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Korganizer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Interesting)
MS did Exchange 2003/Outlook 2003 right.
I use my PDA (Score:5, Interesting)
Yahoo! Calendar (Score:2, Interesting)
Emacs Diary (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, the Emacs diary is pretty flexible, can be configured to give reminders of events and actually works pretty well as long as you have emacs up all the time. I like it better than anything else I've run across. The old PalmOS diary was pretty useful, too, but my last PalmPilot died a couple of years ago and I haven't found a PDA to replace it yet. I'm thinking of writing a webapp for calendar events and hooking it up to Asterisk to call my cellphone with reminders (Use festival for TTS or something like that *vague handwave*)
My To Do List Is... (Score:3, Interesting)
For OS X: Entourage 2004 (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using Entourage since Office 2004 can out for Mac. It's great, the mail client, calendar, to do list, and address book all integrate nicely. It really simplies all the things I need to do to stay organized.
While I'm not sure it's worth the high price of Office, if you can get it through a campus agreement (like I did) for under $20, I'd recommend it.
Outlook, for understanding words as well as dates (Score:4, Interesting)
One I programmed myself (Score:5, Interesting)
Evolution + iPod (Score:2, Interesting)
But this isn't much use if you can't read your calendar when you need to, so I use some of the scripts from gtkPod to sync my calendar, contacts and todo with my iPod. It works quite well, and since I carry the iPod around fairly often I can always get to the information.
I have vague memories of gnome's time/date widget thingy also showing me my appointments for each day, but it doesn't seem to do that anymore - I think after I upgraded evolution. (I'm running debian unstable).
Re:I use my PDA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Korganizer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yahoo! Calendar (Score:5, Interesting)
Way fricken cool. I'll never go back to a non-web based calendar.
TI-89 Titanium (Score:1, Interesting)
Google Notifier (Score:2, Interesting)
Gmail is great, so I bet Google could design an excellent web-based calendar program (could work on PDAs too, no HotSync necessary!)
I already save a collection of Gmail Drafts that aren't "To" anyone, but have subjects like "Programming Ideas" and "Stuff To Remember". That way I can add stuff whether I'm at work, home, or school.
Re:Korganizer (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no idea how Kontact does it, but that's as good a guess as any.
Re:NOTHING! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Outlook, for understanding words as well as dat (Score:3, Interesting)
the real need? (Score:3, Interesting)
But this is just for me. The real strength of Outlook, (as it has been mentioned before,) is really it's connection to an Exchange server. The problem is that it ties you to an Exchange server.
If anyone has ties to the P2P networking world, *This* and not simple file sharing, would seem to be the killer app.
can you imagine the ability to link and unlink with various groups and schedules via a peer to peer protocol? If there were a convenient way to connect a group of people's scheduling etc. without having to maintain a central server? and be able to segregate the views based on selected groups?
hmmmmmm.
though I suppose that you always need a central server for those who only occasionally connect, but that might be relatively easy...
Re:Project / Task Management Software (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Well, you seem like you probably wouldn't be convinced otherwise, but I've personally decided all that "micromanagement" stuff like "priority", "status", and "dependencies" is just useless and counter-productive.
It just gives you the illusion that you've somehow taken the whirlwind of stuff everybody needs to do and "captured" in the computer. And therefore "controlled".
Then when your team doesn't update the progress, doesn't pay attention to the priorities, etc., etc., you decide that either 1) your team sucks or 2) your tool sucks. But the whole idea of computer-based project management sucks, that's the problem.
I don't have quite the same situation as you (I have maybe 20 projects, 5 active at a time, teams no larger than 10), but I've settled on basecamp [basecamphq.com]. It's really just a glorified bulletin board. I agree with the creators: project management is just a communications issue, nothing else.
With basecamp you can post messages and receive messages. You can create milestones with dates and responsible parties. There's no hierarchy, no gant charts, no fluff. Just a place for everybody to communicate.
You might want to check it out....
Re:One I programmed myself (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Outlook 2003 (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.
Home-Grown (Score:2, Interesting)
In the end, I discovered that there were two issues. First, there was always a couple of things that I liked but couldn't do - sorting, or categorizing - whatever. Second, and more importantly, I never managed to get into a reliable habit of checking my program d'Jour.
So, I decided to take advantae of what I DO habitually do. I open a web-brower every day with a tablist of sites for daily reading. And I always check my email. Taking advantage of that, I built a small system on top of MySQL for personal use. All the features I want, none that I don't. The main interface is a web form (written in bash of all things - practice for a project at work). It only took a couple hours to get it up and running. It's viewable from anywhere, and it sends me email reminders for those important things.
The project is nowhere near being ready for release into the wild, even in the event that demand for a mySQL/bash-driven calendar app increased beyond the current estimated level of zero. Nonetheless, there's no vendor lock-in and no difficulty learning the features or making time to check up on the information daily.
Thanks for posting that! (Score:3, Interesting)
* Can you send calendar invites to other users?
* If you can, will the recipient be able to just click it and add it to their calendar?
Those are two really basic things that are useful to have in a corporate/small business calendaring solution. Sadly, they're features that can tie people into Outlook..
The Perl-based WebCalendar (Score:2, Interesting)
I had many happy client users! But, to be fair, Outlook/Exchange supplanted it. I do think the functionality of Outlook/Exchange is quite nice, and is going to be hard for F/OSS to beat.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:1, Interesting)
-Lyrics
-Notification in the Desktop
-(In the next version) Tab to Wikipedia link of band being played
-Cover-fetching from amazon (I think they're going to change it to use google)
-Playing the damn Audio
-etc.
I think the developers can talk more about it than me...
Libraries like these *reduce* bloat. You know why? Because they're maintained by some guys, so that the other guys don't have to worry about them and so concentrate to make their applications better and faster.
And if two applications use the same library , you only get a version of it in memory, so libraries *cut down memory use*!
BTW, kde is getting faster and faster at each release on the same computer. Ok, I've got 256 megs, but I got kde to run ok. How ? First of all, each version of kde runs better in my system than the previous. But to get a really sleek experience I just had to do tweaks to the system. Like hdparm, tuning vm.swappiness, shutting down services, shutting down arts (It's slow as hell), etc. Search in the net for those things, kde benefits from these tunings . Or, just get a little bit more memory, it's not that expensive....
I'm completely impressed by kde, except for having a couple of crashes once in a while. I think it's better than xp or os x. It's friggin amazing.
For example, as I type this, some words are getting red. That's because every friggin text box in every friggin html that every friggin application opens uses spell check. And these kind of things are only possible to libraries and the genius that the kde devels are by integrating, re-using and creating the framework for these kind of things be possible and (very important) easy to mantain by the developers themselves.
Wikimedia (Score:3, Interesting)
I installed a Wiki on a webserver, behind a password. It's like using pen and paper with endless paper, it goes with you wherever you have an internet connection, and you have hyperlinks.
My calendar is just a page with links to pages named 2005-06-12, 2005-06-13, with headers above them for month names. To-do lists, projects, whatever, I can make new pages just by typing a link to them and then starting to edit them.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Interesting)
If only they got "everything is a file [bell-labs.com]" not "every protocol needs a new KIOslave"
"Everything is a file" is a great abstraction, but it can only be implemented by the operating system. kioslaves are simply an abstraction layer that adds the ability to treat non-file objects as if they were a file without OS support for the notion -- it's the only way they can do it without junking support for just about every operating system in existance.
how am I going to open a remote image with gimp ?
Why don't you ask the GIMP developers to support it? Or ask the developers of the kernel of the operating system you use to support it? Rather than using it as an excuse for complaining about KDE, when it is not the KDE team's fault and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it?
BTW, if you're on Linux you might want to look into the FUSE/kioslave bridge project, which apparently allows you to mount kioslave plugins as if they were a real filesystem...
Wiki (Score:3, Interesting)
Requisite shouting about Lotus Notes (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, normally I'm not one to shout, but I've got to on this one. First, I respect your opinion, and if Lotus Notes works for you, fantastic. But...
I work at a really big company, and our e-mail/calendaring application standard is Lotus Notes. It has caused me nothing but immense pain and anguish. I've used and supported both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, along with their various clients, and I would much rather sell my soul to Bill Gates than use Lotus Notes a single day longer.
I once composed a document three pages long of nothing but bullet points of complaints about Lotus Notes. The "idiosyncratic" interface has literally cost me days of man-hours of work trying to do the simplest of tasks. I won't post the entire list here, because most of the time it boils down to stupid stuff like the fact that it doesn't use standard Windows interface guidelines that allow everyone in the world to just use it like they use every other business application on their desktop.
But I'll point out a few that are causes of my most recent irritations. The first thing that you do in Lotus Notes is launch it, and they even frickin' screwed that up. The first thing you see is a huge Lotus Notes splash screen. Lots of applciations have splash screens, so that in itself doesn't bother me. But the goobers who developed this crapplication have decided to force the splash screen to be a topmost window, so while Notes loads all of its cruft, the user is FORCED to sit there and watch a stupid dialog box. You can't Alt-tab over to Word and continue writing a letter, you can't Alt-tab to Firefox and check out the sports scores; no, you have to watch a stupid splash screen.
How about another? I've been working on throwing together a simple report database where a user can simply compose a new document, fill in some fields, hit a button, and e-mail a report to a list of people. One of the things I would like this form to do is to generate a richtext read-only version of the report in the document, a kind of "preview" feature. The problem is that richtext fields on a form just plain don't work. I've read hundreds of pages of documentation about it, and it all boils down to something like this: "Richtext fields, from a low-level system point of view, do not work like any other field or control in Lotus Notes, so we highly avoid doing anything programmatically with them."
Or how about one of my favorites? Right now, we're doing the above-mentioned report manually by opening up a stationery item, changing it appropriately, and sending it out. Depending on what all goes on during the day, this report can take a few minutes or a couple of hours to compose. I was writing one of the latter reports when I decided that I really ought to save it in case something happens and I lose the copy I'm working on. That is important: I was making a conscious effort to avoid losing data. So I reach for the Ctrl-S key, which is the Windows standard "save what I'm working on" key, and indeed performs the same function in Lotus Notes. The problem is that although I've hit Ctrl-S a thousand times before, on this particular occasion, I accidentally reached to far and hit Ctrl-E instead. I was prompted with a dialog box that said, "Do you want to send, save, or discard your changes? Choose Cancel to continue editing." Now at this point, I realized that I had hit the wrong key, and frankly, I have no idea what Ctrl-E does, so I chose Cancel to continue editing my document.
As it turns out, apparently Ctrl-E is the "Lose everything I've been working on without warning me" button, because my report that I had been working on for a couple of hours suddenly vanished and reverted back to the blank template! Cancel and continue editing my ass, who came up with this idiocy!?
Yes, I've heard a million times about Notes's database capabilities (which are a pale shadow of and much more counterintuitive to use than any real RDBMS out there, even the FOSS ones). Yes, I've heard a
Re:Project / Task Management Software (Score:3, Interesting)
My advice, IBM Lotus Domino products [lotus.com]. It's the most powerful, flexible, and comprehensive tool out there. Technically, it's a software development platform for collaboration and messaging. But there's a subset of tools called "Quickplace" [lotus.com] which includes out-of-the-box features that I think would be perfect for you.
From the IBM Quickplace site:
* Provides anytime, anywhere access to collective knowledge, information-sharing, tasks and team calendar events whether on-line or disconnected.
* Seamlessly establishes a working community with a sense of accountability, whether team members are centralized or geographically dispersed.
* Increases team productivity and efficiency by virtualizing asynchronous collaboration processes, and optionally integrates them with real time.
* Increases responsiveness among colleagues, customers, business partners and suppliers by facilitating instant formation of working teams -- whether team members reside within or beyond the organization.
* Facilitates faster, collective decision making by centralizing timely and accurate information, and granting all team members equal opportunity to review and react.
* Helps make your teams more productive and self-sufficient through easy, instant assembly of collaborative applications using team space templates -- with just a browser.
I've been using it for years, and I still haven't found anything I can't get it to do. Note that it's not for transactional systems (airline ticket systems) and it's not a relational database system (which is a plus!), but it's just perfect for what you described...
My email is shown here at Slashdot (thank you SpamCop), so please feel free to email any questions you might have and I'd be happy to help. I'm not a consultant and I'm busy anyway, so I can't build you a system or anything (this is not a pitch:), but I would be happy to field any questions you have (I have about 10 years experience with Domino).
Don't miss the developerWorks site for Domino [ibm.com] (plenty of info), and feel free to ask questions in the forums [lotus.com] (it's a friendly group!).
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2, Interesting)
I have to manage an Exchange server, and just recently we had a situation where a user was unable to access e-mail in order to set/change their Out of Office reply. The fact that there's no reasonable way for an admin to do that is just stupid. (Yes, there *are* ways to do it, but they are definitely not reasonable).
Also, in the real world, I'd love to see you tell an executive at the company you work for that they don't deserve e-mail because they're too dumb to manage their own Out of Office status. Somehow I don't think you'd be working there much longer if you did.
This is one (of many) places where Exchange fails to perform as it should.