langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-07-18-3

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comment-2002-07-18-3

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 7946 days AGO

I disagree. We clearly have different experiences. I would consider most of the `organizational calendaring' I have seen to be a failure. The calendars I have seen were most often completely circumvented by `real' calendars kept in some completely different mode, and were often kept surreptitiously and completely `out of the system'. The `formal' shared calendars generally contained huge number of `lies' designed to game the calendar rather than to facilitate the actual sharing of information. And most often they were never able to contain the real _consequential_ events that were the most important (Can you imagine Kissinger's Diary saying `In China' back in the Nixon days?)

As to the `incorporation of event sources' discussion, I do a heavy amount of this in my' personal calendar, but the principal problem that has to be solved is the fact that the data arrives in formats that are _completely_ in someone else's control. Thus, the problem has little to do with presentation, and a lot to do with technology (like perl, K, etc) that can be programmed to `recognize' the content. In this area there is also an ongoing battle with PDF-idiots who often choose to completely obscure their information in PDF forms that are essentially impossible to use as a data feed to anything else. And I'm afraid this problem is increasing, not going away. Amtrack may be the most startling US example.

If the `announcements' were about developing the part of the technology that processed and absorbed information, then I'd say someone was focussing on the _real_ problem, but what Apple almost invariably does is just focus on `How it Looks'---failing, apparently, even to notice the real problems at hand. Moving information in my calendar around my net and into my iPAQ is all trivial. I have been doing it for years (starting with an HP LX200 a decade or so ago). Adapting TV schedules, IMDB, and all of the other feeds that move information into a form appropriate to be absorbed is `where it's at', and I don't see that problem addressed by 99%+ of all of `tries'.