SharedCalendar

shared calendaring on the net / time management software

• time sampling software: (used to figure out where your time went. One part of time managment.) Periodically, a timer goes off. (You set the interval – perhaps every 20 minutes). Every time the timer goes off, a window pops up, with the time already filled you. You type in a very short description of what you were doing before you were so rudely interrupted (or else select something from the self-expanding speed list of previously entered activities). I hear that Jan Steinman would be happy to help write this program. Export the data to a spreadsheet, so you can:
  • Sort the data by numbers of occurrences – in other words, make a histogram from it. did I really spend that much time reading blogs?
  • try a fourier transform (named after Joseph) of the data, which will give you a frequency plot, which is handy for understanding periodic habits.
• Tim Bray mentions that iCal Sucks Hugely and asks: “Dear World · Try to find an alternative to iCal. While its UI is good, it’s still kind of sluggish. And all the exciting action out there is in shared calendaring on the net, so you can update it from anywhere and share it with family and friends. Anyhow, my hunt for alternatives is now officially in high gear. I would like an Open-Source alternative so I can verify that they, unlike the iCal developers, know how to save files safely.”
• "Groupware Bad" by Jamie Zawinski 2005 recommends “Do not strap the ‘Groupware’ albatross around your neck! That’s what killed Netscape, are you insane?”. Jamie recommends that, instead, “narrow your focus to just calendars. The first thing you want to do is make it trivially easy for someone to publish their calendar, allowing other people to check their schedule (and, for example, know when our target user has classes, when he’s planning on studying at a cafe, what nights he’s thinking of going to a movie, and what concerts he intends on seeing). Right now people can do that by publishing .ics files, but it’s not trivial to do so, and it’s work on the part of other people to look at them. If it’s not HTML hanging off our friend’s home page that can be viewed in any browser on a public terminal in a library, the bar to entry is too high and it’s useless. “
• "The calendar fiasco" by Jon Udell. The blog mentions Kimbro Staken. “It’s crazy that we haven’t got a ubiquitous way to share this kind of data.”
• "The world could really use Google Calendar" by by Jeremy Zawodny lists a lot of features that people want in a web calendar. Also mentions a lot of specific implementations … and “hCalendar”, which is apparently the iCalendar (RFC 2445) standard expressed in XHTML for easy inclusion in web pages. Some interesting geospatial ideas.
• For public events, the “free-speech calendar of public events” http://wikevent.org/ seems to be the best solution so far.