61–70 of 80 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Storage in UTC and converting to a local timezone for display / notification purposes has been the standard practice for a looong time. All good until summer time kicks in and your recurring 9am meeting now starts at 8am, oops.
But summertime is a (at least here) a separate timezone, e.g., CET vs CEST
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Storage in UTC and converting to a local timezone for display / notification purposes has been the standard practice for a looong time. All good until summer time kicks in and your recurring 9am meeting now starts at 8am, oops.
But summertime is a (at least here) a separate timezone, e.g., CET vs CEST
Unless of course not everybody invited shares the same DST patterns, in which case it has to change for some of the participants (how do you choose which?).
Also, the relationship between the datetime the user chose and the UTC time you store can be retroactively changed by legislation.
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> I guess it’s hard to imagine new features or even incremental quality updates as a viable business idea. There is market for privacy; but the missing piece, after so many years, is how to synchronize calendars in a seamless way.
It’s not just that. Manual entry is still a thing happening too often. Yes, some apps allow to put your booking in a calendar, but that doesn’t cover all use cases. You call, make an appointment — getting an ical via SMS after the call would be great. You open a website, then check there the opening hours or schedule, taking that information to your calendar app would be great. Etc etc.
Google Calendar supports CalDAV, but only behind OAuth, which many clients do not support. I've created https://github.com/bjesus/oauth-hopper to solve that - it takes care of the OAuth steps and provides a clean CalDAV endpoint that you can use to read and write to your calendar from almost any calendar application. In reality OAuth Hopper can be used to abstract OAuth away from any endpoint - it isn't CalDAV specif…
Curiously, the easiest Google product to move away from is "google" (search): I have been using DuckDuckGo for years , both for searching and browsing. I love the ability to burn the cookies after each session! But I haven't been able to replace Gmail, Calendar and Maps (which are quite good products IMO). It's quite ironic that "google" (search) has become one of Google's worst products.
A bit off topic but why are calendars so hard? I recently moved from android to apple and I'm just really impressed no one does a dedupe operation on calendars. Seriously, who works on these things? I'll write you the regex if you really really need it but damn, if you're going to push fancy AI on me to make my life easier at least take care of all the annoying trivial bullshit that makes my life harder.
My pet theory is that it is the data model: everyone must support ical/Exchange and those only support events with a textual description. Events may be a part, but not the only part of a good calender. There is a lot of stuff which could be part of a calender but doesn't necessary fit into the event paradigm: Fuzzy events like the car inspection you are putting of. Transit times - not just the fixed time span you get…
A bit off topic but why are calendars so hard? I recently moved from android to apple and I'm just really impressed no one does a dedupe operation on calendars. Seriously, who works on these things? I'll write you the regex if you really really need it but damn, if you're going to push fancy AI on me to make my life easier at least take care of all the annoying trivial bullshit that makes my life harder.
It’s difficult to maintain basic features in a popular calendar, at least according to the ms exchange team blog: > calendaring is particularly tricky. Why’s that? Well, consider time zones for a start – a meeting you set up isn’t necessarily in the same time as it is for me, and then you also invited people, from a whole bunch of other time zones (did you know some time zones are 30 mins off, not a full hour?) (…) h…
Let's take a trivial problem: holidays. Every account you have comes with a holiday calendar. So if you got a Microsoft, Google, and Apple account you'll have entries in triplicate. These are all day events with identical names. There's a lot of hints to tell you that these are identical and you only need to display 1.
A bit harder would be birthdays. These might not be in a unique calendar. But the word "birthday" is a huge hint when it's an all day event.
I do agree that defaulting to a position of not destroying data is best (though here we'd never destroy data). But that doesn't mean we can't offer users assistance. We do have the capacity to let users merge events or in some way note that they are identical.
One more issue, why the fuck can't I move an event from my Google calendar to my Apple? In the worst case, just copy the damn thing and then hide the event. You can do this even when you don't have write access to the Google calendar.
So the thing I don't buy is that we can't do more. A programmer's job isn't easy. But it involves problem solving. I think there's not enough grumpy yet motivated people who will voice up such things because management usually says that it's not important. But these non important things add up. Life is complex so the little things actually matter a lot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not just that. Manual entry is still a thing happening too often. Yes, some apps allow to put your booking in a calendar, but that doesn’t cover all use cases. You call, make an appointment — getting an ical via SMS after the call would be great. You open a website, then check there the opening hours or schedule, taking that information to your calendar app would be great. Etc etc.
do you need that clutter on your calendar though, when a voice query to perplexity (or siri et al when they catch up) will answer your question about opening hours when you need the information?
As for the clutter, no, there won’t be clutter. There exists a conventional 3-view UI for calendars, but there can be more context-specific variants. E.g. separating awareness from booking on customer journey means that first I add a reminder with the opening hours and later calendar will present an opportunity to book.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s difficult to maintain basic features in a popular calendar, at least according to the ms exchange team blog: > calendaring is particularly tricky. Why’s that? Well, consider time zones for a start – a meeting you set up isn’t necessarily in the same time as it is for me, and then you also invited people, from a whole bunch of other time zones (did you know some time zones are 30 mins off, not a full hour?) (…) h…
I don't buy it. I do think the problems are not trivial but it's not like there aren't trivial problems within the larger problem. Let's take a trivial problem: holidays. Every account you have comes with a holiday calendar. So if you got a Microsoft, Google, and Apple account you'll have entries in triplicate. These are all day events with identical names. There's a lot of hints to tell you that these are identical…
E.g, I record my wife's birthday in my calendar.
I create an event on April 12th, and mark it as an all day event.
What actually happens is that the calendar records an event that starts at midnight, and ends 24 hours later, and is marked as an all day event.
But, when you change timezones the 24 hours actually shift, which can be very weird when you get notifications that are 6 hours earlier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My pet theory is that it is the data model: everyone must support ical/Exchange and those only support events with a textual description. Events may be a part, but not the only part of a good calender. There is a lot of stuff which could be part of a calender but doesn't necessary fit into the event paradigm: Fuzzy events like the car inspection you are putting of. Transit times - not just the fixed time span you get…
My pet peeve: buffer time . Or, rather, lack of it. Almost every calendar event requires some extra buffer time before and after, for things like getting to event location and back, and/or preparing, etc. No calendar app I've ever used even supports the concept, much less does anything to help. Right now, I resort to having a separate calendar for "buffer time" events, which I currently fill manually; I'm working on…
FWIW, in Apple Calendar there is an option for "Travel Time". This will prepend the event with some buffer value. When looking at the event on my calendar, in my iPhone, and ONLY in my iPhone there is a little : (vertical dots + car) symbol and saying (e.g.) "15 minutes travel time", while the event has a vertical continuous bar next to it. On my Macbook, the whole event is just expanded.[0]
My pet peeve: dramatically differing interfaces between devices. I do understand that at times this must happen. But there's no reason for it to in this case. But worse than that, when CREATING a new event on my Macbook it is just so much clunker. I don't see "Starts" and "Ends" until I click on the time, where it instead expands. Then I can see the "travel time" option (in iPhone it is "Travel Time") and if I click the end time I can only select from a pre-determined time of 30min to 3hrs with 30 minute intervals. If I select "starts" I don't get this. In both cases I can __type__ the actual numbers in.
[0] Update: while writing this comment, my macbook's calendar updated to show the vertical dots but does not include the little car nor the text (again with continuous vertical bar under actual event). Why did this take so long? "Just works" my ass. Arch linux has been more stable than trying to live by the Apple way.