langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2002-07-18

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Donnerstag, 18. Juli 2002

newsseer.com

2002-07-18-newsSeer

"jetzt ist aus den astras wieder das astra bier geworden."

2002-07-18-astra

"[Alan Taylor] just walked over to my desk (he works down the hall) and let me know that his Amazon Light application is #1 on Daypop and Blogdex. This should be evidence enough to a few people over here at Amazon that the need and hope for a cleaner, simpler interface to Amazon is there."

2002-07-18-amznLite

Neat-o: Apples iCal (wieder einmal iNametheft par excellence).

www.apple.com/ical/

2002-07-18-ical

2002-07-18-flameFantastic

www.whatdoiknow.org/archives/000415.shtml (merci, Gavin!)

2002-07-18-ffny2002

David Ness 7954 days AGO
We did our first `online calendars' about 30 years ago. They were a failure then. For the next decades we watched others try, and pretty much fail, to do similar things over and over again. Apparently it doesn't occur to anyone that perhaps people don't want to `share' their calendars much. Or that we only have time to fuss with our calendars if we don't have much of importance going on otherwise. At least each generation of systems developers seems to have to re-discover this fact for themselves.

I could do a number on just how many bad ideas Jobs managed to cram into his speech yesterday, iCal among them. But my view is not likely to be widely shared in this audience. Of course this may be `The TIme' that it catches on, but to me it looks like just another in a chain of really bad ideas that make Apple stock worth less today than it was in its early public days more than a dozen years ago.

Anyway, in the short run at least the market seems to agree with me. Since Jobs spoke yesterday the market has dropped the value of Apple by about $1b and at the current rate of `progress' that may be only the beginning.

chris 7954 days AGO
I don't need a calendar at all (mostly because our firm is small enough to keep every noteworthy "event" in my head), but I like the iCal interface nevertheless. And much rather than to share my appointments with the world at large I'd like to subscribe to interesting-but-often-overlooked event "sources".

Besides, organizational (in contrast to personal) shared calendaring can hardly be considered a failure or unnecessary.

David Ness 7954 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'.

gavin 7953 days AGO
RSS is an interesting concept when applied to temporal things. Why not create a new format, call it RTS (rich time summary) or something, make it simple & lean. Publish it like RSS is currently published: a simple url (www.cityevents.com/rts.xml) that you subscribe to like you subscribe to standard RSS feeds. Your aggregator can just poll the feeds periodically, alerting you to upcoming events using a dumb html page. A future feature can be integration with the usual office/scheduling tools. It's not that complicated. Handle timezone conversions locally, etc.

(Just did a little research and there is something like this already, RDF Calendar, with some output Events)

earl 7954 days AGO
I'm scraping an Austrian cinema/movie-site to generate an RSS-feed of movie-starts in Austria. RSS 1.0 with the [create Dublin Core] metadata modules is really applicable to this problem.

Now the only thing I'd need is some consumer program of that feed :) This tool should display the feed in a nice manner and allow "subscription" of events which essentially adds them to my calendar.

Thanks for the links Gavin! Maybe a useful consumer will be found - tomorrow!

muz 7953 days AGO
Ok, so I'm missing most of the interesting tech posts here, but Chris, you are correct, the Flaming Lips album is Fantastic. Just don't let those evil robots eat me.

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