I gave
google calendar a go a few days ago. It entertained me. It was fun, I thought "well its not going to be much more useful the others" (and I have tried a few other web2.0 calendars) but I was surprised. Started using it and will try and keep it up to date. Hopefully it will allow me to become a bit more organized and so on.
What seemed to be a pain tho was keeping the online version and others(offline) on handhelds and so forth synced. Was wondering if you in some way could automate uploading iCal snippets. Exporting(from gCal) is easy but getting stuff into google calendar seemed difficult. Furthermore when inviting people they receive a mail "Do you want to attend? Yes, No, Maybe." I tried it. Clicking on one of these links took me to a "Please login" page. Jeez. Can people not confirm they are coming without a google account? How about not doing evil? Why can they not respond by email? Minor things like that were bugging me. Things I was thinking about that a good calendar app should have. As I had a lot of time on my hands at the beginning of the year I have quite a long list. Mainly inspired by nigel and his ideas of a perfect calendar and "Intelligent agents"(little programs that can collaborate and take action on there own) in it.
If for example you are planning an outdoor event(Golf, motorbike ride, swimming, sipping coffee in the park) then a computer can go and check the weather and tell everyone "Its bloody manchester, event is off" or "Its probably going to rain, reschedule?". Sounds useful to me. Especially if it tells everyone who is on the guestlist. If it sees that I'm going on a long distance flight it could go and do a predefined amazon search for "airport novel" and suggest a few books for me to take/buy(in time!) or even something about where I am going. The possibilities are endless,]]
With
this it seems as if we can do a lot of that. People can respond by email.
Hell we could write a completly different interface for it.
I'll keep it short for now and will look into this later on(I am meant to be writing lab reports rite now). If you are interested in constructing a python lib or even better an erlang one tell me, but I'm quite sure it will only take a few hours till someone has hacked a Atom library to support gCalender.
Update[
Apr 21 14:08]: maybe knock up a quick script that adds all the
academy gigs to a public calendar. Also started a public "Physics at manchester calendar"(
RSS iCal). email me if you want to be put on the list of people allowed to add events
