Calendar Swamp

Calendar as marketing tool

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:21:11 PST

You know those free printed calendars we come across this time of the year? Now they're going online. Tylenol has one at tylenolcalendar.com, and it's strictly a marketing vehicle. Every week or so there's a coupon to print out. It only shows one month at a time. And of course there's no true sharing with any other calendar service or software, just some ways to spam the calendar to others via email, Facebook and the like.

I hope the next marketer to try this discovers iCal feeds!

Droid calendar search: FAIL (Android too)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:39:30 PST

I looked at a Motorola Droid this morning, and it shares the same flaw as Google's Android operating system: you can't search through your mobile calendar!

The press coverage of the Droid completely overlooks the native calendar. As usual, calendaring is the immensely practical application that gets no attention. Nevertheless, previous mobile phone platforms -- BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone -- at least let you search the calendar. Why not Droid? Why not Android?

The best my local Verizon store manager could say was, watch for other native calendars to be developed for the Droid.

But how realistic is that? Even if someone else offers an improved native calendar, could it be brought up from the Android home page instead of the default Android calendar?

I couldn't believe the one reviewer who said Droid has "superior in-device search" to the iPhone.

The market does need alternatives to the iPhone, to keep Apple on its toes. Droid isn't that alternative -- not from a calendaring angle.

I don't blame Motorola or Verizon. This is their release of Google's platform. That's what really amazes me about all this. Google is THE SEARCH COMPANY. It has no excuse to NOT offer search of its Android calendar.

Even when Google's providing device access to its cloud-based Google Calendar, Google comes up short. I wrote back on July, even on the iPhone, the Web version of Google Calendar is not searchable, unlike its desktop counterpart. That is still the case today.

A robust native calendar is essential. I've experienced enough recent outages of Google Calendar to remind me that the cloud is best used as a sync point for calendars -- but 24x7 calendaring is best served up right on the phone or other mobile device.

Opening up Outlook 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:11:56 PDT

Will calendar sharing benefit from having the file format for Microsoft Outlook 2010 be open? I don't know. Time will tell.

GooSync sinks free version

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:56:36 PDT

The free version of GooSync is discontinued as of today. My SwampDrain sensibilities are unhappy and take back one (-1) of the two points awarded back in 2007. Although, in fairness, I haven't used GooSync since I abandoned all flavors of Outlook.

Apology of the week

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:48:30 PDT

Microsoft apologizes and says it was able to recover "most, if not all" the lost calendar data for users of its Sidekick service.

No dollar amount has been given on the damage done to cloud calendaring. But hey, Google Calendar continues to have some downtime, but soldiers on anyway.

How to get events into social networks

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:52:32 PDT

With the proliferation of social networks, services to help publish events across them are a good idea. Calendar Review notes one such service, Active Data Calendar.

Danger Will Robinson

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:11:03 PDT

Cloud Calendar Fail: Sidekick Owners Get Bad News — Phone Data Is Gone Forever.

Danger lives up to its name, by an unintended route.

Tungle improved

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:27:01 PDT

Tungle is making some welcome improvements; worth checking out.

Sync between iPhone calendar and Google Calendar

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:08:49 PDT

I'm not sure how I missed it before, but I've now successfully used CalDAV sync between my iPhone and my Google Calendar. However, when I add an event on the iPhone, I don't appear to have a way to direct the event to a particular calendar defined in my Google Calendar. I'm not sure if this is a limitation of CalDAV or not. Does anyone know?

Yahoo! Calendar syncs with iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:04:54 PDT

New from Yahoo!: Sync your Yahoo! Calendar with the iPhone. No desktop Apple iCal required (never did figure out how to dispense with it in the case of Google Calendar). I've got to check this out, as soon as I can find the time.

FuseCal goes dark

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:39:18 PDT

Synchronizing calendars is a tough problem -- tougher than mere interoperability, tougher than simply publish-and-subscribe. Those who undertake to do it successfully probably deserve the highest number of SwampDrain points that this mere blog could possibly bestow.

Thus it is with a heavy heart that I must report the shuttering last month of FuseCal. During my busy summer, it escaped my notice. Obviously each calendar service must make its numbers to survive, and when one doesn't, it reflects upon the sorry state of the continuing lack of interoperability between calendars, the continuing complexity of calendar interoperability, and the lack of a clarion call from consumers for easy calendar interactions -- whether in the cloud, on desktops, or in our pockets.

The passage of FuseCal also takes with it into limbo the assets of iFreeBusy, which set out to solve a simpler problem: that of providing an easy place to post one's free and busy information.

Now it falls back upon CalConnect to continue to hammer out calendar interoperability standards which can become the basis for more progress and innovation in this area.

Searching calendars on the iPhone

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:41:23 PDT

Basically, if you want to search your calendar on the iPhone, you'd better be using the native calendar app. Why? Because other calendars you can run on the phone -- such as Google Calendar -- incredibly don't provide a way to search the calendar! I couldn't believe this when I first discovered it. After all, it's trivial to search your Google Calendar on a regular Web browser via the prominent "search my calendars" button at the top. But Google Calendar as it runs on the iPhone has no such feature.

Now in fairness, Apple only added this ability to the native iPhone calendar with the recent release of the iPhone 3.0 software that came with my iPhone 3 GS. So it's not like the iPhone could do this at all before that. But given the immense popularity of the iPhone, it's critical that Google add this feature to the iPhone implementation of its own calendar. After all, Google is a search company!

We'll probably see Google and other cloud calendar providers fix their iPhone implementations before it becomes easy to sync the native iPhone calendar directly to their cloud calendars, for reasons explained previously here.

DAViCAL: Another open-source CalDAV server

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:15:11 PDT

A new open-source CalDAV server is making progress: DAViCAL now implements CalConnect's Freebusy Read URL. Written by New Zealander Andrew McMillan, DAViCAL "is a project...to create a straightforward CalDAV server for shared groupware calendaring. The project is written in PHP and uses a PostgreSQL database for backend storage."

Another opportunity for someone to write a cookbook to allow mere mortals to install and operate a low-cost CalDAV-compatible calendar-sharing server at home or elsewhere. Any takers? I may get around to running it and writing it myself.

VueMinder: Another route around Outlook calendaring?

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:40:48 PDT

What the Windows world needs is for a good, modern, interoperable and share-friendly calendar program to challenge Outlook successfully enough that emerging calendar-sync services support it. This will also provide a credible threat to Outlook since Outlook has no competition to speak of. Courtesy of Calendar Review, VueMinder is my latest candidate.

Bump: Watch it and weep

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:56:53 PDT

Calendar sharing used to be a lot easier when River and I both had Palm-based PDAs. We would beam events back and forth with abandon! Then we both left Palm behind and our own calendar swamp was born.

Now, for reasons I explain elsewhere, I am buying an iPhone. If you read my top 10 list of reasons, you won't see "calendar sharing" as one of them. Yes, Apple is improving the iPhone calendar, allowing users to initiate meeting requests from the phone itself. But seeing someone else's calendar still requires a third-party Web service, and if like us you want to keep a local copy of the calendar (not on Google Gears), you'll need Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook on a Mac or PC respectively.

Here's the weepy part: for iPhone users, contact sharing is now as simple as the old Palm PDA beaming was, thanks to Bump Technologies:

Bump is free, so it will probably be ubiquitous on iPhones.

But the makers of Bump cannot add calendar sharing to the service because, unlike what is possible with iPhone contacts, Apple has not published the APIs to allow such sharing when it comes to calendars. Here's the official statement from David Lieb, co-founder and president of Bump Technologies, responding to an email from me:

"We'd love to support calendar event sharing with Bump, but, at least right now with OS 2.2.1, Apple doesn't give apps access to calendar events. We could create a web interface and hack our way around it, but we like to keep things simple and intuitive for our users. Perhaps things will change in future Apple OS releases. As we port Bump to other platforms, this is definitely something we'll want to support."

As I reported earlier here, the iPhone OS 3.0 -- which Bump and all developers are under NDA and cannot disclose details about -- does not include the calendar APIs. Which is a damn shame.

Maybe a groundswell of demand for calendar bumping will follow the widespread adoption of Bump for contact sharing.

May it be so!

Outlook now syncs to Google Apps

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:28:50 PDT

Apple and Google, Apple and Google...will Microsoft ever have another innovative calendar-sharing announcement to make?

Meanwhile, here's Google's latest: create events in Outlook and instantly sync them to Google Apps. (If you pay for Google Apps Premier or have a corporate license.)

iPhone will now generate meeting requests

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:06:57 PDT

According to Fast Company, the new iPhone, with a CalDAV-compliant calendar, can now create meeting requests.

Spanning Sync announces Spanning Tools for Mac

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:47:04 PDT

Today Spanning Sync, the Google Calendar/Apple iCal calendar (and contacts) sync tool, announced the public beta of Spanning Tools for Mac, "a suite of utilities that analyzes, reports, and fixes dozens of problems with iCal, Address Book, and Apple Sync Services — problems ranging from the obvious, such as duplicated calendar events, to the subtle, such as invalid calendar dates."

It's great to see such a utility, one which may be required at varous intersections between different makes of calendar.

Fedora to promote calendar sharing with Exchange

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:23:23 PDT

Dana Blankenhorn reports that Red Hat's Fedora 11 will support calendar sharing with Microsoft Exchange.

Tool to Meet

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:53:12 PDT

From Calendar Review: "I found a calendar website for making appointments in a new way. People do not need any accounts and passwords, and still it is completely private. See www.ToolToMeet.com."

Because it doesn't integrate with existing calendars, I wonder how useful this is. Probably it depends upon whether your calendar can detect meetings being proposed or scheduled inside your email. iCal for Mac does this, as does Zimbra.

Google Wave tips calendar sharing to the cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:15:55 PDT

Some of you may already think shared calendaring is a cloud-only activity, but I submit that lots of folks still maintain their calendar on a PC or handheld device, and struggle (as I do) to try to share it with others. One reason this habit persists is just inertia; another is that the cloud calendars by and large do not really provide a great deal more function than the standalone ones. Cloud calendars such as Tungle start to change that by making it possible to "paint" one's availability on a grid of times, effortlessly shared with other Tungle users.

But Google Wave seems to me to add something really exciting to all software, that is the ability to "play back" the history of any online collaboration, and it would seem natural to me to have a shared calendar where I could do exactly that, following the steps that may have led up to a particular event being agreed upon by various participants. That's just one example of what something like Google Wave can provide. So I'm left believing that whether or not Google has invented a standard way to do this (as they hope) or not, all shared calendars will eventually have this capability, so that you would not only have the schedule, but a history of how the schedule came to be.

The Google Wave demo at I/O this week didn't specifically reference calendaring, but the very first use case was a dialogue between two users trying to agree to attend some event together, so I don't have to think very hard to come up with "waves" whose end product is a shared calendar entry.

The immediate impact on calendar sharing is negligible, but the long-term impact is profound. Maybe I've drunk too much Google Kool-Aid at this point, but any calendar sharing solution that ignores this kind of collaboration ultimately does so at its peril. And having Google do it first probably means it will end up getting done the same way across the Web, and that would be a good thing, whatever my reservations about Google's own privacy policies.

Google Calendar's Star Trek prank

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Fri, 15 May 2009 10:29:10 PDT

I wouldn't be amused if Google Calendar had done this to my calendar.

Tasks now in Google Calendar

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:58:14 PDT

It took a year and three months to happen since I blogged about it, but Google Calendar finally added tasks. Yet another reason to insist on tasks as a standard feature in any online calendar, since at some point, someone's going to want to share it with a Google Calendar user.

4.9 hours per workweek

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Wed, 13 May 2009 16:39:12 PDT

4.9 hours per workweek -- that's how much time business professionals spend to arrange, on average, seven meetings. MediaPost has the details about the study that found this. Seventeen percent of all meetings are rescheduled, which is one place where some services such as Tungle have some area for improvement, as detailed in my most recent podcast.

The study that produced these findings is sponsored by Swiss-based Doodle, a company started in 2007 as yet another would-be go-to place on the Web to arrange meetings.

Revolutionary calendaring

noreply@blogger.com (Scott) — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:20:16 PDT

Dilbert creator Scott Adams: "I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life."