Calendar Apps Suck, Here Are My Suggestions | Hacker News Reader

Calendar Apps Suck, Here Are My Suggestions

brooksreview.net

70 pointsshawndumas26 comments

In which Mac-centric guy writes about all the things he wants from a free calendaring solution after complaining that free solutions are bad and without noticing that Google calendar does many of these advanced kinds of things like setting times when invites can be automatically rejected, shared event setting on one calendar etc.

agree also many of the 'enhancements' he likes would be profoundly annoying, for example bugging you about creating multiple events in locations where it isn't feasible to travel between them according to his assumptions about the nature of the meeting, transportation options, etc.

He literally says:

As we all know this comes down to money, who wants to pay $50 for a good calendar app? I know I would...

After actually documenting his suggestions, only 1 out of 7 concrete suggests are not currently available in Google Calendar. His suggestions, in order:

1) Show only the current day and future days -- Google Calendar does this

2) Can't see when other people are busy or free -- Google Calendar does this (if that person has shared their calendar)

3) Can't see when a group of people have common free time -- Google Calendar does this

4) Get an autoresponse if you invite someone when they are not free -- this is mooted by 2) and 3)

5) Jointed owned calendars -- Google Calendar does this (can give people edit permissions on your calendars)

6) Autoreject invites based on time -- Google Calendar does this

7) Location aware -- OK, gCal doesn't do this.

And the best part? Google Calendars can be synced with OSX/iOS Calendar apps so they can be available offline.

Actually #7 works. When I travel to a new timezone and log in to gCal, it asks me if I want to change my timezone to the newly detected one. Pretty nice :D

This is why HN desperately needs downvote for articles.

Not to disagree with you, but the fact is sometimes I "upvote" an article because it's also the way to save the story and I've liked some comments a lot, even if the referenced article is bad.

http://min.us/mvk23DG

Irony? Or makes perfect sense.

"If they are a Windows Outlook user forget about it, rarely does it work – often they have to manually reply"

If he means that when using iCal to invite someone on outlook then that's probably accurate, but Outlook 2010 has a pretty robust 'pick a meeting time' that works exactly as he described it should across an exchange server. You pick the attendee's it tells you what time works for everyone, and even shows (at a high level glance) which days of the week is best.

In fact, at work, we have a room reservation system hooked up to it so it'll even suggest a room thats available and reserve it.

You can attach meeting agenda's to outlook invites (and I believe you can do with Gmail and an add in?)

Most of the features he described (except maybe the location aware stuff) work on Outlook & Google Calendar. Of course there a few things on both clients that I wish were designed a little better but the functionality he asks for is basically there already...

I desperately miss Outlook 2003, having used a variety of Mac calendaring programs (and dabbling with some online ones). My killer feature for a calender (which Outlook 2003 had) is being able to scroll the "month" view by weeks instead of months. It boggles my mind that this isn't standard by now. I hoped Mac Office 2011 would have this as part of it's Outlook, but no luck.

In terms of interface, I'm a huge fan of calvetica (http://calvetica.com/) on iOS. It leaves out much of the "simulated paper" crap TFA is complaining about. It's also really fast to add new appointments. I only wish there was a Mac version.

Beautiful to look at, but some UI problems and bugs still exist unfortunately.

I happen to partially agree with this post. I don't believe that calendar apps are done right. I think the main problem is that too many people shoe-horn themselves into a system that limits the way they approach managing their diary.

Personally, my calendar would be as simple as a list of events broken up by date, much like a particular iOS Calendar.app view. I hate how miserably non-inter-operable calendars are.

The problem isn't money, but as an earlier post discussed: building a decent calendar app is damn hard.

While this article mostly comes across as being written by someone who hasn't actually RTFM of the major calendaring software packages, it WOULD be great to have some sort of real-time peer-to-peer free-busy system that could interoperate across calendaring systems. Of course, you'd have to have a pretty robust permissions system to make sure that you couldn't just look up anyone's availability, but I think that's a solvable problem if users could exchange permissions when they schedule their first meeting together.

For most of corporate America, shared calendaring is probably the #1 feature keeping them tied to Exchange Server. Solve this problem elegantly, and you could kick Exchange to the curb.

I just started using nudgemail with my Google calendar and I like the ability to just send an email with a task or appointment and be reminded of it as well as have it put into my calendar automatically. It does seem to put appointments into the previous day however.

Have you tried Tungle.me?

Yes, tungle is pretty great, i use it for most of my meeting bookings. The ability to give free times and that if i book another time in one of my linked calendars, is exactly what the calendar world needs. The view options i'm not sure about.

One other thing I'll add is that I like showing the whole week because it gives me context for what day of the week it is when I'm looking at my calendar.

I love the idea to show today + x days in the future and not the past.

Can somebody please build a better calendar for OS X?

Google Calendar does this. Just switch to "4 Days" view.

Not really. GCal will show you yesterday, today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.

What the poster wanted was "today" set wider so that you didn't get "multi-appoinment-squishes-text-into-unreadable-jumble" columns, then a two days in the future (no Yesterday), in a narrower column, and then a fourth column with things that are more than 3 days away but presumably less than a month or maybe a couple of weeks away.

That is a much more intuitive way to think about scheduling for some people. And one that I would use if GCal supported it.

That's not what I get when I click on "4 Days" in my calendar. I get Today, Tomorrow, The Day After and The Day After That. (In settings you can customize this to be any number of days, including 3.)

Not exactly what the poster wanted: doesn't integrate the agenda view into the same screen, and doesn't make Today bigger (though does visually highlight it, which I would argue has the same effect).

Otherwise, it's pretty damn close.

You are right, sashthebash wants exactly what GCal provides for the most part. (For what ever reason going to settings on my paid version of GAFYD doesn't support changing the 4 day view from anything other than yesterday, today, + two days, but I don't disbelieve that you have a version that has such a feature available to you).

I wasn't being clear in my response that I was talking about what the author of the linked article actually has a much better design [1] in mind for a 'bigger than today, less than a week' view. I think it would be nice if GCal picked that up, I can understand that its providence might make that impossible.

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/25553417@N00/4971755231

A userscript could easily achieve this, no? just extend the width of .wk-today and .tg-col-today. I guess the agenda view would be harder. I'll try this as soon as I get home.

Absolutely, and a good test of the CSS Pivot stuff.

When I first started at Google I there were lots of meetings and I missed a few because everyone was in quad cubes and so nobody had speakers or anything going, and my Calendar notifications (as a blinking tab in firefox) were easy to miss. To get around that I built a device that was connected to my workstation via USB (it was basically an Arduino clone) which had an LCD display and an LED and a button. When the next meeting was coming up it would display on the LCD and the LED would flash (hard to miss) and stop flashing when I pushed the button acknowledging that I had seen it. Was going to add a 'snooze' button but didn't get around to it before I left.

That hack used the GDATA API and Python to pull my calendar data and send them out to the display. It would be pretty easy to implement the modified future view idea as a local script which captured that you wanted and put it into a view like this.

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