Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Mr. Sippey, iCal and various ways to munge semi-structured information
Michael Sippey has been messing around with iCal, the calendar-sharing specification. His blog lists a LazyWeb request that someone write an iCal plugin for Outlook, but he's also written (and borrowed) some php that turns a simple timeline into a nice, syndicatable calendar.
Hm. Back when I used to keep my schedule using a pen and paper, I would make all sorts of friendly annotations to remind me of what days were like. If it was especially beautiful or rainy out, I might draw a big sun or dark clouds and rain spatters. If some significant even occurred in the world, say an eclipse, disaster or the President saying he was going to try to amend the US Constitution to build a little bias into it, I would so note in my schedule. All this not only made it easier to find things (it was a few days before that big storm), but it also added texture that helped me relive days gone by.
Some iCal-sharing sites exist already, like iCalShare and iCalExchange, but they don't seem to do much. Imagine the Yahoo TV listings available as subscribable iCal feeds, which anyone could then use as raw material to create their own media recommendations, which I could then subscribe to (at last! the Michael Sippey media zine!). Sync this to my Tungsten running NoviiRemote, set it in front of the entertainment center, and a longtime wish of mine would be fulfilled.
Or imagine the weather available as an iCal feed, or different people's perceptions of what was newsworthy. Couple those with permalinks to blog posts and RSS feeds for additional information and you start to get a rich toolkit for managing semi-structured, temporal information.
Speaking of temporal information, why is the Microsoft Office suite so pathetic at timelines and other structures involving time? Excel in particular just sucks at charting timelines. (If you've found a way to do it, send me some hints.) Do they think adding time smarts will kill sales of Project? They can't actually believe that.
If you'd like a taste of iCal but you're not on a Mac (where iCal is built into several apps), consider installing Mozilla Calendar. (In fact, first you should install Firefox, the completely-ready-for-prime-time Mozilla browser formerly known as Firebird. Bye-bye, IE!)
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I consulted to the INIT consortium and wrote an issue of Release 1.0 titled Personal Data Interchange, where I tried to describe things that eventually turned into vCards and iCal. Too bad they're still not doing what they should do. I know vCards are almost as awkward to use in Outlook as the Tasks function. (Just looked it up; it was September 1993.)
Hm. Back when I used to keep my schedule using a pen and paper, I would make all sorts of friendly annotations to remind me of what days were like. If it was especially beautiful or rainy out, I might draw a big sun or dark clouds and rain spatters. If some significant even occurred in the world, say an eclipse, disaster or the President saying he was going to try to amend the US Constitution to build a little bias into it, I would so note in my schedule. All this not only made it easier to find things (it was a few days before that big storm), but it also added texture that helped me relive days gone by.
Some iCal-sharing sites exist already, like iCalShare and iCalExchange, but they don't seem to do much. Imagine the Yahoo TV listings available as subscribable iCal feeds, which anyone could then use as raw material to create their own media recommendations, which I could then subscribe to (at last! the Michael Sippey media zine!). Sync this to my Tungsten running NoviiRemote, set it in front of the entertainment center, and a longtime wish of mine would be fulfilled.
Or imagine the weather available as an iCal feed, or different people's perceptions of what was newsworthy. Couple those with permalinks to blog posts and RSS feeds for additional information and you start to get a rich toolkit for managing semi-structured, temporal information.
Speaking of temporal information, why is the Microsoft Office suite so pathetic at timelines and other structures involving time? Excel in particular just sucks at charting timelines. (If you've found a way to do it, send me some hints.) Do they think adding time smarts will kill sales of Project? They can't actually believe that.
If you'd like a taste of iCal but you're not on a Mac (where iCal is built into several apps), consider installing Mozilla Calendar. (In fact, first you should install Firefox, the completely-ready-for-prime-time Mozilla browser formerly known as Firebird. Bye-bye, IE!)
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I consulted to the INIT consortium and wrote an issue of Release 1.0 titled Personal Data Interchange, where I tried to describe things that eventually turned into vCards and iCal. Too bad they're still not doing what they should do. I know vCards are almost as awkward to use in Outlook as the Tasks function. (Just looked it up; it was September 1993.)
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