Re: [Design] 0.7 Planning (Reframing the issue.)

[Ted Leung]

On Dec 2, 2005, at 4:37 PM, Alec Flett wrote: Ted Leung wrote: 3. How would a family use it to keep track of vacations, school holidays, doctor's appointments and school activities? We are actually doing this at home now via iCal and a behind the firewall webdav server.  I have a calendar and Julie has a calendar.  We both subscribe to each other's calendars and to the OSAF office calendar (so she knows my meeting schedule).   I think this surfaces a bit of a weakness (at least from what I've seen) of our sharing-centric view on calendars. My impression has been (and if I'm wrong, that's fine - but if its the impression I got it might be related to the shared understanding of chandler at OSAF) that chandler sharing was so that I could share my calendar with others, or so that a group calendar (like the office calendar) could be shared by multiple people. I think that actually I'm unlikely to really want to share my calendar with others. I probably just want them to be able to see when I'm available. Free time is really all I want for person to person sharing.  Ironically, it's more work to get free time only than to just dump the contents of your calendar, which is why i have a separate work and home calendar.  The work calendar is actually exposed to the outside world so that folks down there can subscribe to it, without being bothered by the details of my non-osaf life.   The office calendar, which has public events and holidays and so forth is really just read only as far as I'm concerned.  I suppose you could argue that it's a source of events to be added to your own calendar. But anyhow, what struck me was that Julie needs to subscribe to Ted's office calendar.. that seems somewhat broken. Instead, Ted needs to decide, for himself, which of the events on the office calendar are actually part of his daily activities, and somehow incorporate those into his personal calendar. But honestly I'm not sure how close we are with Chandler here, probably because I don't understand the intended workflow. When Julie goes to find free time on Ted's calendar, she may or may not see all of the events on his personal calendar, but in any case she can see free/busy, and can thus find out when he's free. Actually the reason she subscribes to the office calendar is that I don't put events from the office calendar in my "work" calendar, because I'm too lazy to copy them. If there were an easy way to copy an event from one calendar to another, I might do it.  The only negative to this implementation for Julie is that it appears that I am busier than I really am.  Since she is almost always scheduling outside my regular work hours, this turns out to not be a problem in practice. Further, she shouldn't NEED to subscribe to his calendar to see free/busy information. I'm imagining the nightmare the sidebar would become if I needed to subscribe to the calendars of the other 20 people at osaf just to schedule a meeting with them! Obviously this is demonstrating the value of a good Free/Busy implementation but I think the other thing at least I need to understand is the relationship between shared and personal calendars, how that relates to Free/Busy, etc. Well, if the workgroup is small, I think you can get away with out a good Free/Busy.  Right now I have 9 calendar overlays in iCal, and it's still manageable.   I do agree that 20 would be a disaster. And then finally, lets say Julie finds time on Ted's calendar.. how does she actually indicate to ted that she wants to get together? Does she put the event on ted's calendar for the next time he syncs on his end? Does she put it on hers and tell him to go add it to his? Here we get to the value of invitations... one of a number of scenarios, each of which does happen 1. she just schedules the event - probably because we've talked about what we want to do, and figuring out when is up to her.  We sync every 15minutes, so that's the window for conflicts. 2. she sends mail 3. she sticks her head into my office. So is there a workflow where you can have invitations without free/busy, or one where free/busy is useful without invitations? i think that invitations are only useful if you have some way of knowing when people are free -- notice that I didn't say automatic detection of when all parties are free.  Visual inspection of overlapping calendars is workable for small groups.  I agree that it's far from ideal, but it can be made to work.  Invitations without free/busy is basically just specially titled email/IM, because its much more likely that you are going to have to negotiate the meeting time Ted

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