Where is the Killer Calendar? 725
AnonaCow writes "Firefox and Thunderbird rock my world, but Mozilla's Calendar (Sunbird) has a long way to go. This maybe mundane, but what software does the slashdot community use to schedule? How do you keep track of your various appointments? What about your 'To Do' List?"
Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Interesting)
MS did Exchange 2003/Outlook 2003 right.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Insightful)
Bugzilla, unfortunately carries the string 'Bug' in its title, and gets branded as a bug-only tool. I much prefer Mantis, and both tools contain a "Feature" item in the dropdown... report your "items" as a feature, and let someone else implement/comment on them. Not everything listed in Bugzilla has to be a "bug" in the system. Lack of a key feature can be seen as a bug by some users.
But my post was actually "bait" to see if the OP had actually mentioned these feature requests anywhere but his rantings o
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2)
In house we use eGroupWare's calendar for company and personal events - it does the job well, but the complaint is always that "it's n
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2)
I run Slackware on my primary computer but there is nothing on the Linux side that comes close to Outlook 2003. Believe me, I've tried them all. I keep a Windows box around just for my scheduling. Microsoft also got Pocket PC right. I've never had a problem syncing my Dell Axim with Outlook 2003.
I'm not a fanboy. I use the right tool for the job. For general computing and coding I use Li
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Funny)
I know I'll probably get shouted down over this, but I switched from Outlook to Lotus Notes and have never looked back. The interface is, um, idiosyncratic, but once you get used to it, it's immensely customisable, and surprisingly effective at ensuring you know what you need to know.
Requisite shouting about Lotus Notes (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, normally I'm not one to shout, but I've got to on this one. First, I respect your opinion, and if Lotus Notes works for you, fantastic. But...
I work at a really big company, and our e-mail/calendaring application standard is Lotus Notes. It has caused me nothing but immense pain and anguish. I've used and supported both Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, along with their various clients, and I would much rather sell my soul to Bill Gates than use Lotus Notes a single day longer.
I once compose
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
There is only one program I've found that handles time zones correctly: TrueSync Desktop and it is abandonware. I kept buying motorola P8167s for years just so I could stick with TSD.
There are two features of TrueSync Desktop that no other PIM seems to do correctly, and there is only one correct method. The two features are:
1) When you create an standard event, you specify the time zone the event will happen in. All time zone math is handled automatically. This is the only correct method of handling events for people who travel outside their time zone regularly.
2) When you mark a special day, say a birthday or a holiday, TSD remembers the date, rather than creating a 24 hour event from 0:00 to 23:59. This is the only correct way to handle special days.
Consider the following scenarios, which I face almost every week:
A) You are in California on the phone with someone in Boston planning a phone conference from 10:00-11:30am for next week at which time you'll be in London. What time should you set the conference for? Can you do the math? How about if you're in Phoenix in April? There are 31 time zones and almost all contain some regions that observe and some that do not observe DST. This is the sort of irritating arithmetic my computer should do, and only True Sync Desktop does it the right way.
With Outlook can set your system time zone to the time zone the event will happen in, then create the event, then set your time zone back to the time zone you're in. Oh yeah, that's really convenient.
B) You make a new friend on a visit a trip that includes a visit to Hawaii and Boston and put her birthday in your outlook/phone tools calendar. You get to San Francisco. What day is her birthday? With outlook when you change time zones the event straddles two days, only one of them the actual correct day. Depending on whether you travel east or west, the correct date is either the first or the second of the two days marked. How flabbergastingly stupid is that?
Now one would think that _someone_ (anyone) involved in the development of outlook would, sooner or later, actually travel to a different time zone and realize just how utterly brain dead their handling of time zones really is (yes, outlook supports two (2)whole time zones, and for purely bicoastal people that's fine, but some of us actually travel to the flyover states occasionally. And some people even travel outside the US, which is still legal.)
I personally can't stand the outlook look and feel. I find it sort of smothering, though I acknowledge that there are some good features to it, but if there's one good model for how a PIM should work it's True Sync Desktop, but since it won't sync to a modern phone, it's just not all that useful anymore, sadly.
Thanks to my incessant whining, BVRP has put time zones on it's feature path, so Motorola's PhoneTools might soon correctly implement time zones and all-day events, probably more quickly if more people encourage them to.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using it for years now (since my reliable calendar stopped being supported on RedHat). They seem to have shaken most of the annoying bugs out of its time handling in the past few releases that are bundled with Fedora Core. What irritates me is that evolution wants so badly to be a suite when I just want a damn calendar to go with my fetchmail+procmail+sa+mutt+rsync+ssh+xterm distributed mail handling gyrations.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone who ever worked on Outlook ever get on a plane? Ever? Do they know what a time zone is?
Anyone take an exchange server around the world? I maintain a few shipboard servers for the US Navy, and one thing I know (believe) is that Microsoft never intended for exchange servers to change time zones. If we update the time zone of the server, say advance it by one time zone, all scheduled events are off by an hour. The only solution we found that outlook, exchange, and some other software would work with (because they seem to have differing ideas about how to reflect the change) was to leave the time zone the same and just advance the clock.
It seems also that both exchange and outlook have some if-then blocks to deal with some time zone changing, but nether knows what the other does about it. I'm not sure if this has changed with newer versions of the software (we are several behind the current).
One would think that if the exchange server doesn't move (it usually doesn't), that outlook would work across time zone changes.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:4, Informative)
the Exchange Team told me that the servers were never meant to have their time changed. Microsoft handles time changes on the client side (meaning windows) so windows adjusts the time for you and that reflects on the Outlook
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2)
But usually I have a empty enough schedule that I can just memorize everything.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2)
I third that emotion. I sync my phone regularly with it so I always have the next couple of weeks information to hand.
Also I live in a shared house and we have a webdav server on the house LAN which we all publish our calendars to. There's also an events and birthdays calendars maintained. Is that terribly nerdy?
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
'Hope that helps. have a nice day.'
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:2)
Re:Outlook 2003 - Stop the FUD. (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop the insanity!
I've got Outlook 2003 open to an Exchange 2003 server right now. My mailbox is about 1.3GB. I've got a few add-ons, too, such as the LookOut search tool. It's using 25MB RAM.
It loads very fast, too.
For what the application does (it's not just e-mail) I think 25MB is certainly very resonable. Where's all that bloat you mac users like to spread around about Microsoft and Windows and Office?
Not liking the company is not a reason to lie about the applications they create. I hate Microsoft just as much as the next guy, but I really like Outlook and I look forward to when an OSS replacement app matches it. Evolution is very close, and I think in a few more revisions it'll be there. But it doesn't mean Outlook is crap. It's not.
And why do you need all that free RAM anyways? I have memory in my computers to use it. Sure, every software developer could write software that uses almost NO memory. But then they'd all run like shit, too. No, I'd rather use all my RAM up if that means my apps run faster. Because, you know. THAT'S WHAT IT'S THERE FOR.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all very astonishing of you, considering that later in this thread you admit that you have never actually used Outlook2k3...
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, I'm open to try it, but I don't have a machine capable of running it. I've been Windows Free for quite a while now.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Insightful)
iCal in theory, will always be less bloated than outlook, simply because it has a more limited feature set --- read into this however you may.
By its own nature, all iCal has to do is provide a rudiementary scheduling interface. Although the UI is beautiful and the program very useful, the future set is very basic. For people like myself who do not require the full capabilities of outlook and exchange, iCal is more than adequate. On top of iCal's very basic architecture, of course, you get neat features tacked on top such as automated reminders and web publishing.
If you work in a big company and use exchange, quite simply, that extra code bloat in outlook is going to pay off bigtime, because you're actually going to be using that "bloat" to boost productivity. If you need the advanced workgroup features of outlook/exchange, chances are you're already using it.
At the moment, for windows, Outlook 2003 appears to be the best calendaring/email application out there, regardless of wether or not you use it to its fullest extent. Although I love iCal for its simpliity and ease of use, I give major props to the MS development team for creating a damn good application. Considering the extra capabilities outlook brings to the table (wether or not they're actually necessary), Microsoft managed to do it with virtually no bloat. Outlook 2003 truly is an elegant application.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Insightful)
How may ways do you want to define where the signature file is today?
iCal is ok but...... (Score:4, Insightful)
ical is also not equipped for work groups, strictly a single user experience. At the office (1000+ workstations) we have been using groupwise for years and years and years. It is not without its ups and downs, but for email and calendar/scheduling it is a decent mule.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Insightful)
This machine I'm typing on has a cool 128 MB of ram. Loading an application that requires 25 software libraries to do something as simple as sort a list or add a funky widget toolbar is not something this machine can withstand with ease. Running thin, streamlined apps is something that keeps my machine enjoyable to use.
That said, the Open Source world is far from listening to our calls to reduce bloat; instead they drive forward, coding the same application over and over, disorganized libraries, untracable dependencies, all and all just masses of code lumped together. While this bulk of code has thousands of useful features, many of them are hidden from sight behind a terminal which scares people away, and the few that make it through to the desktop are often behind clunky software libraries that people are constantly at war building and defending.
I hope this post doesn't come off as a troll because I really love and enjoy Linux and the BSDs that gracefully allowed Mac OS X to come into being, but I seriously hope that we get better at organizing our efforts as developers and software engineers and not continue forever honing our programming skills. While an app may not be perfect, it can Just Work, and we can fix the bugs as we go. For the critial apps, good design begets good implementation. We should embrace these lessons as we look to the future.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
Also note that your complaint about bloat falls on the deaf ears of comercial/propreitary software devs too. Close source apps are bloating up all the time. Think of how much redundancy is used even in MS apps when Office XP or 2k3, Visual Studio, Media player, & normal apps use different libraries which provide different GUI widgets & controls. How about Adobe Acrobat? They finally heard the collective complains about that bloated POS & v7 is quick to load up. Now only if they could retroactively make v5 & v6 quicker.
Make Acrobat load quickly! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Make Acrobat load quickly! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Interesting)
If only they got "everything is a file [bell-labs.com]" not "every protocol needs a new KIOslave"
"Everything is a file" is a great abstraction, but it can only be implemented by the operating system. kioslaves are simply an abstraction layer that adds the ability to treat non-file objects as if they were a file without OS support for the notion -- it's the only way they can do it without junking support for just about every operating system in existance.
how a
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
oh dear, no go"
File -> Open Location.
Seems to work fine to me, you can also drag the URL from another application.
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:3, Insightful)
Where I work, the users have pushed their PST files onto the local filese
Re:Outlook 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
(In cached mode, Outlook "merely" synchronises against Exchange. Everything is stored in both places - meaning that nothing on the client has to be backed up, you only have to back-up the store on the Exchange server. This is easy to do - just use NTBACKUP to generate a BKF file - you don't even shut the server down. Also, since you only have to protect the server, you'll often use a decent RAID setup to reduce the chance the backup will ever be needed.)
If a workstation falls over, you reinstall outlook and set up the account. It just downloads everything back from the server and you're up and running.
It also sounds like you have an information managment problem - people's outlook account is not really where you should be storing important corporate information.
pen and paper (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:MOD UP! (Score:5, Funny)
Generalizations always suck.
Maybe just me... (Score:2)
Korganizer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Korganizer (Score:5, Funny)
Shouldn't that be: "Korganizer Kas Kpart Kof Kontact Kdoes Ka Kdecent Kjob Kand Kit Kactually Kintegrates Kwith Kexchange."
bork bork bork?
Re:Korganizer (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no idea how Kontact does it, but that's as good a guess as any.
I use my PDA (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I use my PDA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I use my PDA (Score:2)
Re:I use my PDA (Score:3, Informative)
Even better, to my mind, is that Linux (thus probably OS X, not sure) has a clone of Palm Desktop software: jpilot!
That program does everything I need it to do: to-do list, address book, calendar...
And it syncs with any Palm PDA. I love it, and wish there was one for windows.
Outlook seriously bugs me, though I know that Jpilot doesn't have anything close to an Exchange server (because the PDAs don't use them to start with).
So for small needs, a PDA, or PDA syncing app
So far... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So far... (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. Your method sucks at the office, when you need to schedule a meeting of about 10 people at a time when everybody is free (you need to look at THEIR calendars) and find a conference room that is available for that time period, then track RSVP's. And you have to assume that everybody else actually writes all their own appointments on their calendars.
That's a LOT of phone calls, walking around to cubicles, and collecting post-it notes. And then you're gonna wind up fighting over a room anyway with the other folks who got there first.
Korganizer (Score:5, Informative)
To make sure I look at it, my login session opens it whenever I log into my machine (and I do shutdown nightly just to start clean though it's hardly necessary). A cron job to open it every morning would be just as helpful.
Obviously, this needs at least some level of KDE installed.
Re:Korganizer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Korganizer (Score:3, Informative)
Yahoo! Calendar (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yahoo! Calendar (Score:5, Interesting)
Way fricken cool. I'll never go back to a non-web based calendar.
Emacs Diary (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, the Emacs diary is pretty flexible, can be configured to give reminders of events and actually works pretty well as long as you have emacs up all the time. I like it better than anything else I've run across. The old PalmOS diary was pretty useful, too, but my last PalmPilot died a couple of years ago and I haven't found a PDA to replace it yet. I'm thinking of writing a webapp for calendar events and hooking it up to Asterisk to call my cellphone with reminders (Use festival for TTS or something like that *vague handwave*)
Re:When (Score:3, Insightful)
My To Do List Is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My To Do List Is... (Score:5, Funny)
Morning - Read Slashdot
Afternoon - Read Slashdot
Evening - Read Slashdot
Note: Time to look for job? Not today.
For OS X: Entourage 2004 (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using Entourage since Office 2004 can out for Mac. It's great, the mail client, calendar, to do list, and address book all integrate nicely. It really simplies all the things I need to do to stay organized.
While I'm not sure it's worth the high price of Office, if you can get it through a campus agreement (like I did) for under $20, I'd recommend it.
Re:For OS X: Entourage 2004 (Score:3, Insightful)
Out of interest why?
One of the things I hated when I had to use Windows (in business) was that unlike the OS I loved (RISC OS which doesn't have the concept of the MDI and everything is opened in its own window) it had big monolithic apps rather than lots of little ones that worked together.
One of the things I like about OS-X (and the earlier MacOSes) is that they have relatively small apps that do work together.
Isn't the point of the GUI to be
Re:For OS X: Entourage 2004 (Score:3, Informative)
And for people that graduated from College and are in the
Outlook, for understanding words as well as dates (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Outlook, for understanding words as well as dat (Score:3, Interesting)
Decidedly low-tech (Score:3, Insightful)
I've found over the years that if I start compiling things into a "to-do" list or a schedule, then I'm more inclined (not less) to miss things or not do things, because they have officially become more of a nuissance by being on a list of things I feel obligated to do. When I just keep track of things mentally instead, then it doesn't feel like it's hanging over my head all the time and I feel like I can do it whenever I damn well please, which makes it more likely to actually get done.
One I programmed myself (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One I programmed myself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One I programmed myself (Score:4, Interesting)
Kontact (Score:3, Informative)
Evolution + iPod (Score:2, Interesting)
But this isn't much use if you can't read your calendar when you need to, so I use some of the scripts from gtkPod to sync my calendar, contacts and todo with my iPod. It works quite well, and since I carry the iPod around fairly often I can always get to the information.
I have vague memo
Evolution (Score:2)
Scheduling? (Score:3, Funny)
Evolution 2.2 (Score:2)
PDA, actually (Score:2, Informative)
And, if it doesn't do something that I need, I'll write something that does.
Mozilla Calendar and Lightning (Score:5, Informative)
Mozilla Lightning is also doing well in development. You can see some screenshots of it here (may load slowly): http://diary.e-gandalf.net/?p=35 [e-gandalf.net].
It seems like these developers finally understand the great need for Calendar products. I frequently hear discussion of the most wanted features, such as different calendar formats, integration with other handhelds, etc.
how about integration with other programs (Score:3, Insightful)
How about integration with other calendar programs.
iCal, Netscape Calendar, and Outlook- none of them actually work with each other (sorry, they DO NOT despite what anyone has told you; for example, an iCal calendar item's title won't show up properly in Mozilla Calendar.)
It's pretty astounding that a simple file format like a frigging CALENDAR can't be standardized acr
Thanks for posting that! (Score:3, Interesting)
* Can you send calendar invites to other users?
* If you can, will the recipient be able to just click it and add it to their calendar?
Those are two really basic things that are useful to have in a corporate/small business calendaring solution. Sadly, they're features that can tie people into Outlook..
As a mainly Mac user... (Score:2)
I like MS Entourage a lot better than iCal, and if it had direct support for iSync I'd probably use it instead. Supposedly an update this summ
WIsh list: day marking (Score:2)
For example:
Recycling day. Mark the day before the actual day to remind you to take it out to the curb. But if you miss it, no big deal.
Pay day. Direct deposit, whoopee.
iCal + iPod + iSync = trifecta (Score:3, Insightful)
but iCal synched with iPod is bliss.
Additionally, you can post your iCal schedule online and share it with
What do I use? Pens and a whiteboard... (Score:3, Insightful)
So to organise anything, I use a whiteboard with pens. Why? Its better than any digital application as it works without power, doesn't require me to sit down to use it, and most importantly, it requires gross motor control, something that I still have.
When you're able to write your todo list in 10cm letters at any time, able to check it off in many ways, and even the ability to doddle when bored, you'll see that there isn't a single application that can ever come close to a whiteboard.
NeoThermic
Need a server first (Score:2)
Having a calendar client is all fine and good, but until open source calendar servers are as ubiquitious as Apache, a calender client isn't going to be a lot of use.
An especially promising initiave in this are is the Hula project [hula-project.org].
iCal under MacOS X! (Score:2)
Gregorian (Score:5, Funny)
Horde Kronolith (Score:5, Informative)
The one final and best solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Psion Agenda (Score:3, Insightful)
As a 5-year-old release, the Agenda version I'm using is probably getting hard to synch up with desktop- or network-based apps, but I've never really seen much point in doing that. I can check it whether I'm at the office, at home, or anywhere else, after all.
Project / Task Management Software (Score:3, Informative)
I have been meaning to ask this question to the community here for a while.
I am looking for good task management software. And I haven't seen anything yet that does what I need. Please let me explain.
I'm a project manager and Architect (software development) with 5 direct reports and an Offshore Team which I co-manage with others. It's a large project...30 people, over 4 years.
At any given time I have approx 125 tasks out there, for myself and my team. I have been having a hard time keeping track of stuff using excel and pen and paper.
I've considered writing the software I need (possibly in perl/perltk/mysql) but I don't have the time.
I'm looking for something more flexible than MS Outlook...which is way too simple, but not as top heavy as MS project (which I use for long term planning...but does not really do what I need for task management).
I should be able to assign a task with:
-5 levels of priority
-Task description
-Status (not yet assigned, assigned, in progress, cancelled, hold, late, completed)
-Proposed start and end dates
-Actual start and end dates
-Assign primary responsibility, backup, and off responsible helper
-Task due to (group or individual)
-Category (by my definition)
-Sub-category (by my definition)
-Status comments (by date)
It should have the ability to assign subtasks to a task... for example, task 10, which is a UAT release, is dependant on task 15 which is a daatabase refresh assigned to our DBA. This requirement sounds like MS Project but I really don't need top heavy project plannig software in this case... just task management.
Yhe tool should be able to generate reports and
I should also be able to program it with a simple schedule, say a schedule of software releases and I should get reminders of what's coming up in the next X period of time.
I am sure that someone else has needed this level of detail and control, and has this problem already solved. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
wbs.
Re:Project / Task Management Software (Score:3, Interesting)
My advice, IBM Lotus Domino products [lotus.com]. It's the most powerful, flexible, and comprehensive tool out there. Technically, it's a software development platform for collaboration and messaging. But there's a subset of tools called "Quickplace" [lotus.com] which includes out-of-the-box features that I think would be perfect for you.
From the IBM Quickplace site:
* Provides anytime, anywhere access to collective knowledge, information-sharing, tasks and team calendar events whether on-line or disconnected.
* Sea
the real need? (Score:3, Interesting)
But this is just for me. The real strength of Outlook, (as it has been mentioned before,) is really it's connection to an Exchange server. The problem is that it ties you to an Exchange server.
If anyone has ties to the P2P networking world, *This* and not simple file sharing, would seem to be the killer app.
can you imagine the ability to link and unlink with various groups and schedules via a peer to peer protocol? If there were a convenient way to connect a group of people's scheduling etc. without having to maintain a central server? and be able to segregate the views based on selected groups?
hmmmmmm.
though I suppose that you always need a central server for those who only occasionally connect, but that might be relatively easy...
Ecco Pro (Score:3)
It has:
* Nested outline notes for everything
* call tracker
* looks just awful
If the last is not too much, check it out. It's great. Available here thands to CompuSol [compusol.org]
Wikimedia (Score:3, Interesting)
I installed a Wiki on a webserver, behind a password. It's like using pen and paper with endless paper, it goes with you wherever you have an internet connection, and you have hyperlinks.
My calendar is just a page with links to pages named 2005-06-12, 2005-06-13, with headers above them for month names. To-do lists, projects, whatever, I can make new pages just by typing a link to them and then starting to edit them.
Re:Blackbook? (Score:2)
Re:iCal (Score:2, Informative)
Re:iCal (Score:2, Informative)
Re:iCal (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course this assumes you have a OS X machine around... But try it out sometime at an Apple store or something if you don't have a Mac zealot friend
Re:paper! (Score:2)
Re:Geeks, organized? (Score:2, Funny)
And of course, the best way to schedule things is to work out the dependency rules, and then just run make on it. If you have someone to help you with your todo list, then make -j2.
Re:Now we know your lying.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:NOTHING! (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to sound harsh, but based upon your comments I get the sense that you probably haven't managed a project or otherwise been responsible for the work of others.
wbs.
Wiki (Score:3, Interesting)