On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Paul Makepeace wrote: > Basic hour-by-hour, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly views. Something > that produces HTML output for inclusion or direct embeddable on the > web would be my personal ideal, to be shared with various types of > people. E.g., a client could see in detail what I'm doing on their > project and the rest is simply blocked off as "available/not available". > Prospects could get an overview of availability say during a month.
I found CyberCalendar via the mod_perl examples page a couple of months ago, and ...sort of like it. <http://www.cyberweavers.com/download/cybercalendar.html> CC is a web-based, browser-accessed application, and of the calendar applications I looked into at the time, I liked the feature set of CC best. In particular, of the calendar programs I looked at, it was the only one that advertised the ability to offer vCal files (which would be great for transferring entries from the server application to, say, Palm Desktop or Mozilla). Plus, you can setup different calendar categories, each of which may optionally allow public submission of events, and these public events can either be queued for review or posted directly to the site. On the downside, it's not very flexible. Most of the HTML is directly embedded in the Perl code, and it is very bad, old school <FONT> based HTML at that. They do silly things by letting you set a "stylesheet" where you fill out a not-very-clear form, and the fonts & colors you select are dynamically plugged into page elements at serve time, rather than e.g. having the generated code use '<foo class="bar"> and having a real (if dynamically made) CSS sheet specify what to do with "bar". I spent some time trying to clean this mess up, but it wasn't very fun and eventually I gave up on the idea. It also seemed to be flaky about letting you re-edit committed events. If something was supposed to happen next Tuesday, but now it's going to be next Thursday instead, there was no clean way to change this. Annoying. CC could be the prototype for a decent calendar program, but I assume that a rewrite & rethinking of some basic assumptions could only help. *** Farther into the web-cal idea, Yahoo's calendar service doesn't seem to be that bad (some kind of Palm support, etc). The main thing that has kept me from signing up is just a general discomfort at the idea that I'd be recording my comings & goings on some company's public servers. *** Back towards the desktop, Mozilla calendar is nice, but Palm Desktop isn't bad either, and you can download Win32 & MacOS/OSX versions for free from Palm's site. If you don't have a PDA, you can just ignore that aspect of the application, but the functionality it provides is pretty good. Apparently, Palm Desktop is basically a rebranded version of Claris Organizer, which seems to have had a strong reputation even before the Newton came out, nevermind the Palm Pilot. And now it's free, and just as useful without the PDA as, I assume, Claris Organizer was. -- Chris Devers [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/ binary, adj. 1 Offering little choice; maximizing the chance of error. 2 Relating to the 20th century's boring challenge to the Babylonians. 3 Relating to a numbering system introduced to protect children from parental help during math homework assignments. 4 Reflecting the quintessential dichotomy of the universe. -- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
