d2r: calendar questions

calendar questions

Part of the work on the new beta of cactus has to do with making the calendar work properly and adding main missing features to it (such as recurrent events, or all day events). One interesting area in this sense is the calendar "properties" or configuration if you will. Here are the main elements that I'm working with at the moment:

Format for date
Format for hour/min
Timezone (to support timezone shifts when traveling or working with a group on a different country, etc)
First day of the week (eg., "Monday")
Workdays. Each day of the week can be a workday or not. If it is a workday we can specify previously set "working hours" as ranges start-finish (multiple ranges for each day are allowed, as opposed to most current tools where only one range per day is possible).
Holidays. Each holiday can have a day/month, name, and description.

This stuff would be represented in an XML file (see an example here) that will be accessible from the root dir of the application and configurable through the API as well.

Questions: what are other important calendar settings? Calendar functions in general would be interesting too, but general properties are the main focus at the moment. However, if there's any particular element of your current calendar software that you find annoying or some feature that you'd really, really like to have, let me know too. Drop a comment, or send me an email. Thanks!

Categories: clevercactus
Posted by diego on October 13 2003 at 1:32 PM

Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).

You may be doing this already, but for proper internationalization you should also consider the "first-week-of-year" relating to the week-number calculation. Outlook has 3 alternatives: "Starts on Jan 1", "First 4-day week" and "First full week".

Posted by: L Jantzen at October 13, 2003 1:47 PM

The biggest problems with calendars as they stand tend not so much to be with the representation of individual items as with synchronsation, sharing and publication.

As far as individual items go, you need to have timed and untimed. Where you have alarms on untimed events you need to be able to specify the alarm (or "due") time even though the event is untimed. Last cunning thing is that you need two alarms per entry - a warning (x units before) and an actual (which, if you're being really clever, may also be x units before - if you have a meeting you may need an alarm half an hour before to do the final prep and 5 minutes before to actually go from your desk to the event).

Hmm... I could probably go on for hours once I start considering possibilities so I'll stop NOW.

Posted by: murph at October 13, 2003 2:56 PM

What I really would like to have? Much before being able to say that monday is my first day of the week, I'd choose "synchronization with my 7650/3650 phone"!

I'm getting so jealous at the Mac OSX guys whose iSync tool now supports thorough syncing with the Series 60 phone (and even UIQ P800, I've heard).

Any progress on that front, Diego? How do you intend to do it? Reverse-engineering what happens on top of PPP between the phone and the desktop (via the totally undocumented use of the ports 3000 to 3002)?

Cheers.

Posted by: Oli at October 13, 2003 3:15 PM