Fave calendering software?

[Paul Makepeace]

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.

Does anyone use Evolution's calendaring and have any comments?

(iCal looks great but is OS X only, right?)

Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/

"If I ask for help, will you be kind and help me, then kermit would have
 been blue."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Chris Devers]

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.



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  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 ' 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

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Paul Sharpe]

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.
Does anyone use Evolution's calendaring and have any comments?

(iCal looks great but is OS X only, right?)

Paul

I like Mozilla calendar:

  * RFC2445
  * Multiple calendars which can be overlayed in any view
  * Remote calendars with WebDAV
There's some code knocking around that does iCalendar -> RDF -> HTML. 
Here's the iCalendar -> RDF bit

  http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/ical2rdf.pl

And an RDF -> weekly view in perl

  http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2003/weekly-view/

I'm sure I saw some XSLT to do the RDF -> HTML but I can't find it right 
now.

paul

--
Paul Sharpe  Tel: 619 523 0100 Fax: 619 523 0101
Russell Sharpe, Inc  mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
4993 Niagara Avenue, Suite 209   http://www.russellsharpe.com/
San Diego, CA 92107-3185

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Ben]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 12:11:05AM +0100, 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.

There's always swarmcal (written by Simon Wistow and my evil twin, Skippy).
It's *so* not finished but it's up and working - in fact quite a few l.pmers
have accounts on it. 

Mail me offlist if you want details / code.

Ben

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Ronan Oger (roasp)]

>
> Does anyone use Evolution's calendaring and have any comments?
>

I've been playing with Evolution for 4 months, and am now trying to weam 
myself off it. I am dissatisfied with the amount of resources it takes up.

I'm on KDE/300MB ram/500MHz Thinkpad 600X, and Evolution seems to take up too 
much of my precious resources. While it's nice and slick and does everything 
I need, I have resource issues when I run it at the same time as I run 
Mozilla. 

If you've got the resources, it's a nice tool. But if you're using slightly 
aged hardware, watch out for resources. Maybe it's not so bad if you're 
running Gnome already...

Ronan

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Simon Wilcox]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Ronan Oger (roasp) wrote:

> > Does anyone use Evolution's calendaring and have any comments?
> >
> 
> I've been playing with Evolution for 4 months, and am now trying to weam 
> myself off it. I am dissatisfied with the amount of resources it takes up.

Evolution broke horribly in 1.4 with IMAP. They changed something in the 
way it scans for new messages and it's now too slow to be usable.

I switched back to pine over imap and it seems to work fine for me.

I do miss the calender and the contacts but on the whole I'm surviving 
without it !

Simon.

-- 
"Men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from
 Alpha Centauri were _real_ small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
 

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Paul Makepeace]

Je 2003-08-29 07:11:42 +0100, Paul Sharpe skribis:
> 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

> I like Mozilla calendar:
> 
>   * RFC2445
>   * Multiple calendars which can be overlayed in any view
>   * Remote calendars with WebDAV

Thanks for this - I've been using it a little while now and it seems pretty
effective. I'm using latest .xpi from http://mozilla.org/projects/calendar
in Firebird 0.6.1 and it's working fine (haven't tried the web upload
yet).

The only challenge was /running/ the damn thing. I have no idea how to
launch it from Firebird. It's possible to launch FB from it by clicking
on the M logo but the selected profile is ignored (at least bookmarks
didn't show up). Anyone?

My solution: firebird -calendar& and then use a different profile (I
created a "Calendar" profile).

Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/

"What is the colour of air? It's all circles within squares."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Jody Belka]

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> The only challenge was /running/ the damn thing. I have no idea how to
> launch it from Firebird. It's possible to launch FB from it by clicking
> on the M logo but the selected profile is ignored (at least bookmarks
> didn't show up). Anyone?

Yep, install the QuickTools extension pointed to from the calender page
and then use the Calender menu item that can now be found under Tools.


Jody

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Sam Vilain]

On Tue, 02 Sep 2003 01:17, Paul Makepeace wrote;

  > The only challenge was /running/ the damn thing. I have no idea
  > how to launch it from Firebird. It's possible to launch FB from it
  > by clicking on the M logo but the selected profile is ignored (at
  > least bookmarks didn't show up). Anyone?

Obviously you've never pointed Mozzy to this URL then:

chrome://navigator/content/navigator.xul

-- 
Sam Vilain, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

  The most merciful thing in the world ...  is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents.
H P LOVECRAFT

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Mike Jarvis]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 01:35:46AM +0100, Jody Belka wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> > The only challenge was /running/ the damn thing. I have no idea how to
> > launch it from Firebird. It's possible to launch FB from it by clicking
> > on the M logo but the selected profile is ignored (at least bookmarks
> > didn't show up). Anyone?
> 
> Yep, install the QuickTools extension pointed to from the calender page
> and then use the Calender menu item that can now be found under Tools.

Which is one of my big fears with Firebird becoming "Browser" (that
is, the only mozilla browser).  the guys running it are still wedded
to the idea of pushing everything into extensions.  Last I saw they
still weren't going to add a menu item to switch style sheets on the
reasoning that you can download an extention to do it.   I think even
fewer people will want to use Moz if it's nothing but gecko with
plugins.

I like the idea of a slim, quick browser, but I think they may be
getting too religious about it.

-- 
mike

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Dominic Mitchell]

Mike Jarvis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Which is one of my big fears with Firebird becoming "Browser" (that
> is, the only mozilla browser).  the guys running it are still wedded
> to the idea of pushing everything into extensions.  Last I saw they
> still weren't going to add a menu item to switch style sheets on the
> reasoning that you can download an extention to do it.   I think even
> fewer people will want to use Moz if it's nothing but gecko with
> plugins.

The nightlies of FireBird have a stylesheet switcher icon in the bottom
left.   No extensions needed.  I presume that this will find its way
into the next version.

One thing I think should be a browser builtin feature (and should have
been since about 1994) are the nav buttons.  They're firebird's
replacement for mozilla's site navigation bar.  The nice thing about
using these in FireBird is that it's got a customisable toolbar, so you
only get the bits you want.

http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/#NavButtons

-Dom

-- 
| Semantico: creators of major online resources  |
|   URL: http://www.semantico.com/   |
|   Tel: +44 (1273) 72   |
|   Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Iain Tatch]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2003, 6:27:04 AM, Mike Jarvis wrote:

MJ> I like the idea of a slim, quick browser, but I think they may be
MJ> getting too religious about it.

If you ever use That OS (even if it's just at work with an enforced NT
workstation or something), I can heartily recommend K-Meleon for a
lightweight, highly-configurable Moz-based browser.

   http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/

-- 
Iain | PGP mail preferred: pubkey @ www.deepsea.f9.co.uk/misc/iain.asc
($=,$,)=split m$"13/$,qq;13"13/tl\.rnh  r   HITtahkPctacriAneeeusaoJ;;
for(@[EMAIL PROTECTED] m,,,$,){$..=$$[$=];$$=$=[$=];[EMAIL PROTECTED];[EMAIL PROTECTED]
]eq$$&&$=>=$?;$==$?;for(@$)[EMAIL PROTECTED] eq$_;;last if!$@;$=++}}print$..$/

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Mike Jarvis]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 07:00:20AM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
> Mike Jarvis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Which is one of my big fears with Firebird becoming "Browser" (that
> > is, the only mozilla browser).  the guys running it are still wedded
> > to the idea of pushing everything into extensions.  Last I saw they
> > still weren't going to add a menu item to switch style sheets on the
> > reasoning that you can download an extention to do it.   I think even
> > fewer people will want to use Moz if it's nothing but gecko with
> > plugins.
> 
> The nightlies of FireBird have a stylesheet switcher icon in the bottom
> left.   No extensions needed.  I presume that this will find its way
> into the next version.

It does have the icon, but it doesn't have the menu items (which sucks
if you hide the status bar, and the menu items take up no more space
if you have menus on).  

There's also no way to use a user defined stylesheet on the fly, since
the icon only appears if alternate stylesheets are available.  I hate
it when UI elements come and go as they please and don't just stay
still.  I also think it's pretty unfreindly to make people dig around
to find the right file to modify to use their own style sheets.

I think the real problem is tunnel vision.  The developers assume that
if they don't use a feature, nobody else does either.  The whole idea
of moving everything off into extensions was fine when Firebird was
just an alternative to Mozilla, but as the base browser I'm afraid it
needs to bloat up some.

-- 
mike

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Dominic Mitchell]

Mike Jarvis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 07:00:20AM +, Dominic Mitchell wrote:
>> The nightlies of FireBird have a stylesheet switcher icon in the bottom
>> left.   No extensions needed.  I presume that this will find its way
>> into the next version.
> 
> It does have the icon, but it doesn't have the menu items (which sucks
> if you hide the status bar, and the menu items take up no more space
> if you have menus on).  

Can you hide the status bar?  I didn't realise that...  Ooh!  Wow!  More
real estate!  Thanks!

> There's also no way to use a user defined stylesheet on the fly, since
> the icon only appears if alternate stylesheets are available.  I hate
> it when UI elements come and go as they please and don't just stay
> still.  I also think it's pretty unfreindly to make people dig around
> to find the right file to modify to use their own style sheets.

Yup, I agree.  Using ones own style sheets should be made much easier.
Although to some extent this is worked around by bookmarklets such as
the stuff in the squarefree collection:

http://squarefree.com/bookmarklets/

A lot of those do things that you might conceivably want to with user
defined stylesheets.

-Dom

-- 
| Semantico: creators of major online resources  |
|   URL: http://www.semantico.com/   |
|   Tel: +44 (1273) 72   |
|   Address: 33 Bond St., Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1RD, UK. |

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Paul Makepeace]

Hmm, so there's a Debian package "mencal" -- that's "menstrual calendar"
-- which prints calendars like cal(1) but with certain days in ... red.
Yes, it's written in perl.

And why not,
Paul

-- 
Paul Makepeace ... http://paulm.com/

"What is quids in in German? Touching myself so it *really* feels good!"
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Steve Keay]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 01:17:05AM +0100, Paul Makepeace wrote:
> My solution: firebird -calendar& and then use a different profile (I
> created a "Calendar" profile).

Hmm, I just tried this and I decided to download the "UK Holidays"
from the same page.  Can anyone tell my why it has New Year's Day on
the 1st of December?

I also find it a little worrying that Christmas, etc are not
re-occurring events.  I like to speed forward to 2020 in the calendar
and see that Christmas is still there.

Re: Fave calendering software?

[Chris Devers]

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Steve Keay wrote:

> Hmm, I just tried this and I decided to download the "UK Holidays"
> from the same page.  Can anyone tell my why it has New Year's Day on
> the 1st of December?
>
> I also find it a little worrying that Christmas, etc are not
> re-occurring events.  I like to speed forward to 2020 in the calendar
> and see that Christmas is still there.

Didn't you get that memo? No Christmas for you after this year!


Cthulu Matata!




-- 
Chris Devers  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://devers.homeip.net:8080/blog/

ALU, n.  [Arithritic Logic Unit or (rare) Arithmetic Logic Unit.]
A random-number generator supplied as standard on all computer systems.

-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995