I have been an iCal hater since I switched back to the Mac at 10.2
I have written long emails to Apple with pages of basic, baseline functionality that was missing in iCal.
10.3 iCal = utter disappointment
10.4 iCal = utter disappointment
I would have paid for the OS X upgrade just for a decent iCal. As others pointed out, calendaring is a core function.
I spent years hating iCal on these boards, asking whether or not it requires Steve Jobs to use a program for Apple to be able to make it great. Or if Apple just doesn't care about business users at all.
So, for 10.5, I was no longer hopeful. Yes, my heart leapt yesterday when I saw iCal finally put in the ability to have automatic reminders for appointments. (Yes, it's pathetic that my heart leapt and that iCal doesn't have this feature.) But there is still no decent way to sort and group tasks, so my expectations were still low.
But then I read some magic words in the article: Apple is now using iCal and iCal server internally.
This is fantastic news. This means iCal, while still missing some basic features, is going to be a meaningful upgrade in 10.5.
And with Apple "eating their own dog food" now with iCal, it means that there is hope for a truly great iCal in a future OS X update.
There are some great ideas in iCal. There has been for years. But the missing of basic features and pathetic speed made it Apple's worst application. By a long shot.
But now with this focus from Apple internally, there is hope.
I (cautiously) look forward to 10.5 iCal, and hope that by 10.6, Apple re-invents task and calendar management. (Everyone is still in the outlook model, and there are much smarter paradigms for how people work today and try to manage their overflowing inbox and limited free time.)
Count me as hopeful, excited, with fingers crossed...
I wonder if iCal on my desktop (not the server version) can now collaborate with Mozilla Sunbird? I tried setting up Sunbird on a PC in my office earlier this year and found that it cannot work collaberatively with iCal over the network. It would be a huge benefit if this became possible.
Robert, you're the guy whose brain I need to pick. You have the same hopes and needs, but more knowledge than me. Great insights.
Thanks.
Well, I was happy when I read Leopard's iCal would support CalDAV finally, because until now iCal was such a promising but useless orphan.
I'm confident that we'll be able to get the kind of use we need with iPhone & Leopard OS, the question for me is just whether it'll be out-of-box no extra cost with Leopard's iCal or if I'll go through 3rd party (Zimbra looks the best for me). I'm at a dot-edu that already uses and supports Zimbra, so that would be OK.
If you're a small business and want to try Zimbra even for just a couple of accounts, you go through a hosting company like 01.com, pay them like $20 a month for the whole package: licenses, e-mail accounts, the calendar server, OTA syncing and everything.
The Zimbra demo of iPhone UI is a web application (runs through Safari) but it still looks pretty slick. (www.zimbra.com;www.01.com;http://blog.01.com; you can google zimbra, iZimbra & iPhone and find useful links).
It just remains to be seen how much we'll be able to do with the new iCal on its own or in combination with Zimbra. I'm not a programmer or developer, just a user like you, waiting for better information.
Invite participants to the event, and your attachments are sent to the meeting recipients. To add attendees, simply click the attendees link and start typing names; iCal immediately looks up contacts from your Address Book for matches, and then offers to send out invitations. Users get a clickable file they can use to accept or decline your invitation, and iCal tracks their responses. It's like Exchange Server without maintaining expensive infrastructure and paying for all those Client Access Licenses.
How do you need Exchange for this? I have just Outlook 03 running at home, and I can invite anybody to my appointments, even check their availability IF (no-one does, I admit) they publish their calendar on the 'net. The receive a nice e-mail with all the accept, decline, suggest different time buttons. No linceses paid.
I did notice, however, that GMail can't interpret these invited
This may seem minor to most folks, but one of my biggest pet peeves with iCal is that I can't open and view the details of more than one event at a time (unless I'm missing something). Do Apple employees have so few meetings on their calendars that they never need to look at more than one event at a time (to compare details, copy/paste info between them, etc)? If the "information bubble" is the only way to view event details, the situation just got even worse! If the bubble is attached to the event title on the calendar like the screen shot suggests, not only can I not view details of more than one event at time, it is now blocking my view of the titles of events behind the bubble!
Please, someone with a developer release tell me this isn't the case! I can open more than one e-mail at a time, I should be able to open more than one event at a time. Also please tell me that iCal event reminders have more snooze options. There are some pretty huge gaps (ie 1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day, 1 week...how about half days, 2 days, etc?) and no absolutes (end of day, tomorrow morning).
iCal is the only thing preventing me from switching from Entourage to Mail/iCal/Address Book.
In both the iCal and Chandler screenshots, appointments which occupy the same time are displayed overlapping each other. This makes the text difficult to read. Didn't the developers consider this issue? Compare this to the Microsoft Schedule+ and Outlook 2001 screenshots, where events occurring at the same time are displayed side by side-- much easier to read.
I agree. I live in Month view as my events are usually a full day. I leave the drawer open all time to easily tab thought details for each event. So when I tried iCal 3.0 and found the drawer gone I could not belive it.
iCal 2.0
Open drawer
Single click to see info
Tab to next appointment to see more into - life is good.
Microsoft halted development of Office on the Mac in 1994
This is the first time I've ever heard of this. I don't remember any press releases from Microsoft. If They did Apples stock would have dropped to $.01 instead of $12.
For those of you that are interested in web access to iCalendars, please check out Webical (http://www.webical.org).
"Webical is a Web application to view and edit multiple iCalendars. Its features include progressive enhancement, a plugin framework that can be used to enhance the GUI and the back end providers, pluggable authentication, and i18n. Dutch and English localizations are provided, and adding more locales is easy. You need a servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat, to run it."
We have a working WebDAV backend implementation. A CalDAV backend plugin is underway and to be released real soon now.
FYI: Palm never charged for Claris/Palm Organizer. It is still the best PIM available though never got much needed improvements, and is now very dated. Hopefully I'll move on now with Leopard and something like Nighthawk eventually.
I'm not finding the current Outlook 3rd-party plug-in for CalDAV. I'd like to use iCalendar server for a client, but they have lots of Outlook users. Anyone got a pointer to a production-quality plug-in?
Comments
I have written long emails to Apple with pages of basic, baseline functionality that was missing in iCal.
10.3 iCal = utter disappointment
10.4 iCal = utter disappointment
I would have paid for the OS X upgrade just for a decent iCal. As others pointed out, calendaring is a core function.
I spent years hating iCal on these boards, asking whether or not it requires Steve Jobs to use a program for Apple to be able to make it great. Or if Apple just doesn't care about business users at all.
So, for 10.5, I was no longer hopeful. Yes, my heart leapt yesterday when I saw iCal finally put in the ability to have automatic reminders for appointments. (Yes, it's pathetic that my heart leapt and that iCal doesn't have this feature.) But there is still no decent way to sort and group tasks, so my expectations were still low.
But then I read some magic words in the article: Apple is now using iCal and iCal server internally.
This is fantastic news. This means iCal, while still missing some basic features, is going to be a meaningful upgrade in 10.5.
And with Apple "eating their own dog food" now with iCal, it means that there is hope for a truly great iCal in a future OS X update.
There are some great ideas in iCal. There has been for years. But the missing of basic features and pathetic speed made it Apple's worst application. By a long shot.
But now with this focus from Apple internally, there is hope.
I (cautiously) look forward to 10.5 iCal, and hope that by 10.6, Apple re-invents task and calendar management. (Everyone is still in the outlook model, and there are much smarter paradigms for how people work today and try to manage their overflowing inbox and limited free time.)
Count me as hopeful, excited, with fingers crossed...
Thanks.
Robert, you're the guy whose brain I need to pick. You have the same hopes and needs, but more knowledge than me. Great insights.
Thanks.
Well, I was happy when I read Leopard's iCal would support CalDAV finally, because until now iCal was such a promising but useless orphan.
I'm confident that we'll be able to get the kind of use we need with iPhone & Leopard OS, the question for me is just whether it'll be out-of-box no extra cost with Leopard's iCal or if I'll go through 3rd party (Zimbra looks the best for me). I'm at a dot-edu that already uses and supports Zimbra, so that would be OK.
If you're a small business and want to try Zimbra even for just a couple of accounts, you go through a hosting company like 01.com, pay them like $20 a month for the whole package: licenses, e-mail accounts, the calendar server, OTA syncing and everything.
The Zimbra demo of iPhone UI is a web application (runs through Safari) but it still looks pretty slick. (www.zimbra.com; www.01.com; http://blog.01.com; you can google zimbra, iZimbra & iPhone and find useful links).
It just remains to be seen how much we'll be able to do with the new iCal on its own or in combination with Zimbra. I'm not a programmer or developer, just a user like you, waiting for better information.
Invite participants to the event, and your attachments are sent to the meeting recipients. To add attendees, simply click the attendees link and start typing names; iCal immediately looks up contacts from your Address Book for matches, and then offers to send out invitations. Users get a clickable file they can use to accept or decline your invitation, and iCal tracks their responses. It's like Exchange Server without maintaining expensive infrastructure and paying for all those Client Access Licenses.
How do you need Exchange for this? I have just Outlook 03 running at home, and I can invite anybody to my appointments, even check their availability IF (no-one does, I admit) they publish their calendar on the 'net. The receive a nice e-mail with all the accept, decline, suggest different time buttons. No linceses paid.
I did notice, however, that GMail can't interpret these invited
Please, someone with a developer release tell me this isn't the case! I can open more than one e-mail at a time, I should be able to open more than one event at a time. Also please tell me that iCal event reminders have more snooze options. There are some pretty huge gaps (ie 1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day, 1 week...how about half days, 2 days, etc?) and no absolutes (end of day, tomorrow morning).
iCal is the only thing preventing me from switching from Entourage to Mail/iCal/Address Book.
In both the iCal and Chandler screenshots, appointments which occupy the same time are displayed overlapping each other. This makes the text difficult to read. Didn't the developers consider this issue? Compare this to the Microsoft Schedule+ and Outlook 2001 screenshots, where events occurring at the same time are displayed side by side-- much easier to read.
I agree. I live in Month view as my events are usually a full day. I leave the drawer open all time to easily tab thought details for each event. So when I tried iCal 3.0 and found the drawer gone I could not belive it.
iCal 2.0
Open drawer
Single click to see info
Tab to next appointment to see more into - life is good.
iCal 3.0
Double-click on event to see info.
Click to close window.
Double-click on next event
Oh yeah, this is a lot easier - NOT!
Does anyone know if the new Ical will sync with the google calendar?
I really want to know this as well!
Microsoft halted development of Office on the Mac in 1994
This is the first time I've ever heard of this. I don't remember any press releases from Microsoft. If They did Apples stock would have dropped to $.01 instead of $12.
For those of you that are interested in web access to iCalendars, please check out Webical (http://www.webical.org).
"Webical is a Web application to view and edit multiple iCalendars. Its features include progressive enhancement, a plugin framework that can be used to enhance the GUI and the back end providers, pluggable authentication, and i18n. Dutch and English localizations are provided, and adding more locales is easy. You need a servlet container, such as Apache Tomcat, to run it."
We have a working WebDAV backend implementation. A CalDAV backend plugin is underway and to be released real soon now.
Does anyone know if the new Ical will sync with the google calendar?
I have played with This a little. I stopped using it, but it seemed to work OK. I also installed Lingon.app to run the appropriate scripts at startup.