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.

Mayan

No doubt about it.

Offline

I've got a sexy Drew Barrymore calander which works for me.

WebCalendar

http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] It's stable and it does everything a web calendar should do.

iCal

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. :)

Integration

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.

Gmail integration

Gmail does not integration (or I haven't figure out how to switch it on).

I may be able to help you here! According to Gogle [google.com]:

Gmail Integration
Gmail now recognizes when messages mention events, and you can add those events to your calendar with just a couple of clicks

More here [google.com]:

Gmail integration
Gmail now recognizes when messages mention events, so when you get emailed about an event, you can add it to Google Calendar with just a couple clicks. Look for the Google Calendar links on the right side of your Gmail window.

It'd be neat if iCal/Apple Mail had a feature like Gcal's Gmail integration.

Discretion

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-xchange.org], 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.

None do what is required to displace Exchange.

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?"

Pencil and paper

Pencil and paper :-)

Re:Pencil and paper

You beat me to it...

I just spent two weeks working and exploring in São Paulo, Brasil (my home is in Florida). I've never been to São Paulo before, and had a rather complex schedule of work and touristing, all managed with a couple of print-outs and old-fashion pen-and-paper notes. No PDA, no GPS, a borrowed cell phone just for emergencies, my laptop secured at the company offices. I did have a real (and decent quality) magentic compass in my watch, just to make certain I didn't get turned around.

I never worried about finding an internet terminal, or having my tech stolen, or carrying flashy stuff to identify me as a "rich" American. No worries about batteries, either.

I love my tech as much as the next geek, but I'm a believer in the right amount of tech for the job at hand. Sometimes, paper and pen are all that's needed, and the tech just gets cumbersome or disracting.

The command line tool "remind"

...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.

None

Which do you prefer?

None of them. Calendar entries are by definition personal and I do not trust any company enough, especially ones that offer the service without charge. It would be different if calendar entries were stored in encrypted form (which would require a client, but that could be done with JavaScript, too). Before you call me paranoid: Personal user data gets abused a lot and besides I really have done well without an online calendar until now, so there is no real need to use one for me.

Incompatible calendars

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.

open-xchange.org

open-xchange.org

Open-Xchange(TM) is an collaboration and integration server enviroment with a continuous right management for modules and objects. The product is based on existing components like a web server, mail server, directory server, database ...

There are several interfaces (like WebDAV/XML interfaces) coming along with this software.
Try it out on http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/community/onl ine.htm [open-xchange.org]

ReminderFox

I just caught onto ReminderFox [mozdev.org].

• Integrates into Firefox browser
• Handles one-time and recurring events
• Stores data in open standard formats
• Can be configured to store data file on FTP or WebDAV site for sharing and remote backup.
• Does Reminders (Events) and ToDos
• Is FREE and Open Source

I want a calendar with no boxes

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).

Re:I want a calendar with no boxes

See Google Calendar's Agenda view.

Re:I want a calendar with no boxes

Have you tried kiko's upcoming view? It's exactly what you're asking for. As a Kiko developer, I made sure that we had a list.

Re:Evaluating truth

(+ 1 Parent) ;;Funny
(- 1 Parent) ;;Ugly/Non-evaluating/Non-existent Pseudo Lisp:)