Brad Ideas - calendar - Comments

Shared Calendar

Don Atkinson — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 00:24:35 -0700

Brad,

Many of your ideas are also of interest to me.

Recently I found a web site from a UK company which had PC-based applications but with data stored on their web server, also with web based "sub" applications for access when away from base.
But unfortunately I did not record their URL and now cannot find them.

Have also looked at Airset but the program seems a little error prone.

Have you found anything to satisfy your requirements?

Regards,
Don

Sort it in time!

Phillip Helbig — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 02:38:19 -0700

This reminds me of the guy at his desk who, in the process
of taking care of his paperwork, moved stuff from one drawer
to another. They were labelled "urgen", "really urgent" and
"no longer urgent".

Sort order

brad — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:43:54 -0700

Almost all the mail systems can sort in either direction (first received or last) and indeed by other criteria. However many people seem to get caught in the trap of a big mailbox, and want the new messages at the top, because if you respond to new messages first, you seem very responsive to them, and if you delay 10 day old messages another day, it's no big increase.

This is a bad habit of course, but many people have it, and so that's why we want our software to help with it.

Things need to be sorted correctly

Phillip Helbig — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 07:54:16 -0700

> You leave messages in your inbox that you need to deal with if you canâ€™t resolve
> them with a quick reply when you read them. And then those messages often drift
> down in the box, off the first screen.

I use VMS MAIL for all of my email stuff, and have for 15 years or so. It lists
messages in the order received. I've always wondered why other programs list
newest messages first (even if this can be set by the user, newest first is usually
the default). Thus, quite the opposite from drifting down the screen and out of
sight, the older the message, the more often one is reminded of it. If enough
are in one folder that they don't all fit on the screen, there's a note at the
bottom of the screen saying that there are more, so new messages can't be easily
missed unintentionally either.

Interesting start

brad — Sun, 06 May 2007 11:29:08 -0700

Though it doesn't yet work for my old devices, and it double-fails a test I didn't include, regarding privacy. Going with google calendar puts my calendar in the hands of a 3rd party, which is troublesome, and adding goosync puts it in the hands of an additional 3rd party, though quite possibly they forget the data once it has gone through them. Data on 3rd party servers is not covered by the 4th amendment.

Now, remote web access is hard for most people without a 3rd party being involved, I wll admit, though there are ways that those 3rd parties can do it well, by encrypting the data and using the password I provide during sessions to decrypt it only while I am logged in, extracting things like E-mail alerts into a non-encrypted space when I am not logged in.

goosync

Drew Perttula — Sun, 06 May 2007 04:00:40 -0700

We spoke about this at SHDH tonight. My wife and I use Palm Treos and http://www.goosync.com/ with some success. There's one set of events that appears on both palms and a google calendar. My own google account also merges in other google calendars.

I do not have a way to designate that an event on my palm should be on my google cal but not on hers. There are various sync issues every now and then, such as the 'alarm' flag not getting set on events I receive from my wife. In other words, it's really crummy compared to how such a system ought to work, and I don't know why things are this hard. But, it's also a working system that does a useful thing for my personal info, so that's pretty cool.

Building it myself

freak3dot — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:26:47 -0700

Brad, I found your site as I looked for unique ideas. Yes congrats, I am calling you unique and your ideas good.
The reason I am looking for unique ideas is because I am building a system to organize and manage all my information.
My calendar has some of your ideas. My calendar also displays things from other parts of the system by date. However, I wanted to say something about the way most systems store contacts.

I have address the following problems and others for contacts:

Why can't I have the same phone number linked to two contacts? (Mom & Dad)
Why can't I have the same address linked to two contacts?
Why am I limited to the number of phone numbers or address that I can put on one contact?
Why can't I leave an old phone or address and simply mark it so it is striked out?
Some systems don't allow you to link two contacts together.

My system does allow you to do this and more.
My system also has 5 ways to notify me of events. Text to Speach(audio), wav file(audio), email (home or cell phone address), has it's own web interface, YAC interface to pop up message on computer screens. IM integration is an idea that may be implemented in the future.

My point is that most systems designers are not thinking outside of the box. (have you seen gmails contacts? Good thing they are working on a better version, which I can't wait to see.) They design to mimic the systems of the past. Where is the progress in that?

freak3dot

Google calendar

brad — Thu, 03 May 2007 13:11:04 -0700

As noted, I have tried google calendar. While I like a web interface for roaming, it doesn't quite compare to a dedicated app in ease of use and speed. And it doesn't have a way to sync with my PDA or cell phone (until syncing over the cell phone network works, I suppose, if you buy the data service.)

Re: Sharing Calendars

Echo9er (aka David) — Thu, 03 May 2007 07:37:15 -0700

Brad.

While I have not used a shared calendar, other than at work on the network, for the things you discuss in your post, I have just started using the Google Calendar to share events between my wife, son, daughter and son-in-law.

We are able to post events for each uf us to view. I can invite others to view the calendars as well.

I'm happy with what I can do so far, but as I said, I haven't gone into the depth your are discussing.