VueMinder: Another route around Outlook calendaring?

What the Windows world needs is for a good, modern, interoperable and share-friendly calendar program to challenge Outlook successfully enough that emerging calendar-sync services support it. This will also provide a credible threat to Outlook since Outlook has no competition to speak of. Courtesy of Calendar Review, VueMinder is my latest candidate.

Bump: Watch it and weep

Calendar sharing used to be a lot easier when River and I both had Palm-based PDAs. We would beam events back and forth with abandon! Then we both left Palm behind and our own calendar swamp was born.

Now, for reasons I explain elsewhere, I am buying an iPhone. If you read my top 10 list of reasons, you won't see "calendar sharing" as one of them. Yes, Apple is improving the iPhone calendar, allowing users to initiate meeting requests from the phone itself. But seeing someone else's calendar still requires a third-party Web service, and if like us you want to keep a local copy of the calendar (not on Google Gears), you'll need Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook on a Mac or PC respectively.

Here's the weepy part: for iPhone users, contact sharing is now as simple as the old Palm PDA beaming was, thanks to Bump Technologies:



Bump is free, so it will probably be ubiquitous on iPhones.

But the makers of Bump cannot add calendar sharing to the service because, unlike what is possible with iPhone contacts, Apple has not published the APIs to allow such sharing when it comes to calendars. Here's the official statement from David Lieb, co-founder and president of Bump Technologies, responding to an email from me:

"We'd love to support calendar event sharing with Bump, but, at least right now with OS 2.2.1, Apple doesn't give apps access to calendar events. We could create a web interface and hack our way around it, but we like to keep things simple and intuitive for our users. Perhaps things will change in future Apple OS releases. As we port Bump to other platforms, this is definitely something we'll want to support."

As I reported earlier here, the iPhone OS 3.0 -- which Bump and all developers are under NDA and cannot disclose details about -- does not include the calendar APIs. Which is a damn shame.

Maybe a groundswell of demand for calendar bumping will follow the widespread adoption of Bump for contact sharing.

May it be so!

Outlook now syncs to Google Apps

Apple and Google, Apple and Google...will Microsoft ever have another innovative calendar-sharing announcement to make?

Meanwhile, here's Google's latest: create events in Outlook and instantly sync them to Google Apps. (If you pay for Google Apps Premier or have a corporate license.)

iPhone will now generate meeting requests

According to Fast Company, the new iPhone, with a CalDAV-compliant calendar, can now create meeting requests.

Spanning Sync announces Spanning Tools for Mac

Today Spanning Sync, the Google Calendar/Apple iCal calendar (and contacts) sync tool, announced the public beta of Spanning Tools for Mac, "a suite of utilities that analyzes, reports, and fixes dozens of problems with iCal, Address Book, and Apple Sync Services — problems ranging from the obvious, such as duplicated calendar events, to the subtle, such as invalid calendar dates."

It's great to see such a utility, one which may be required at varous intersections between different makes of calendar.

Fedora to promote calendar sharing with Exchange

Dana Blankenhorn reports that Red Hat's Fedora 11 will support calendar sharing with Microsoft Exchange.

Tool to Meet

From Calendar Review: "I found a calendar website for making appointments in a new way. People do not need any accounts and passwords, and still it is completely private. See www.ToolToMeet.com."

Because it doesn't integrate with existing calendars, I wonder how useful this is. Probably it depends upon whether your calendar can detect meetings being proposed or scheduled inside your email. iCal for Mac does this, as does Zimbra.

Google Wave tips calendar sharing to the cloud

Some of you may already think shared calendaring is a cloud-only activity, but I submit that lots of folks still maintain their calendar on a PC or handheld device, and struggle (as I do) to try to share it with others. One reason this habit persists is just inertia; another is that the cloud calendars by and large do not really provide a great deal more function than the standalone ones. Cloud calendars such as Tungle start to change that by making it possible to "paint" one's availability on a grid of times, effortlessly shared with other Tungle users.

But Google Wave seems to me to add something really exciting to all software, that is the ability to "play back" the history of any online collaboration, and it would seem natural to me to have a shared calendar where I could do exactly that, following the steps that may have led up to a particular event being agreed upon by various participants. That's just one example of what something like Google Wave can provide. So I'm left believing that whether or not Google has invented a standard way to do this (as they hope) or not, all shared calendars will eventually have this capability, so that you would not only have the schedule, but a history of how the schedule came to be.

The Google Wave demo at I/O this week didn't specifically reference calendaring, but the very first use case was a dialogue between two users trying to agree to attend some event together, so I don't have to think very hard to come up with "waves" whose end product is a shared calendar entry.

The immediate impact on calendar sharing is negligible, but the long-term impact is profound. Maybe I've drunk too much Google Kool-Aid at this point, but any calendar sharing solution that ignores this kind of collaboration ultimately does so at its peril. And having Google do it first probably means it will end up getting done the same way across the Web, and that would be a good thing, whatever my reservations about Google's own privacy policies.

Google Calendar's Star Trek prank

I wouldn't be amused if Google Calendar had done this to my calendar.

Tasks now in Google Calendar

It took a year and three months to happen since I blogged about it, but Google Calendar finally added tasks. Yet another reason to insist on tasks as a standard feature in any online calendar, since at some point, someone's going to want to share it with a Google Calendar user.

4.9 hours per workweek

4.9 hours per workweek -- that's how much time business professionals spend to arrange, on average, seven meetings. MediaPost has the details about the study that found this. Seventeen percent of all meetings are rescheduled, which is one place where some services such as Tungle have some area for improvement, as detailed in my most recent podcast.

The study that produced these findings is sponsored by Swiss-based Doodle, a company started in 2007 as yet another would-be go-to place on the Web to arrange meetings.

Revolutionary calendaring

Dilbert creator Scott Adams: "I think the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life."

Podcast #10: Tungle

On April 22 I had a phone conversation with Mark Gingras, founder & CEO of Tungle. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #10 (33:46, 54MB).

Podcast #9: TimeBridge

On April 3 I met with Yori Nelken, founder & CEO of TimeBridge, and John Stormer, TimeBridge vice president of marketing. Listen to Calendar Swamp podcast #9 (58:17, 54MB).

AirSet update

AirSet did a relaunch recently:



In my continuing quest for calendar-sharing nirvana, I visited AirSet and recorded CalendarSwamp podcast #8 (1:10:38, 66MB).

AirSet does more than share calendars now, branching out to share Web pages and documents. There's also a cool Firefox plug-in, the AirSet Connector, that lets AirSet users do the kind of smart cut-and-paste to a calendar that Microsoft demoed, but never delivered in a product.

More about smart cut-and-paste calendar options in my next podcast.

Tungle explained

Interesting new YouTube video from Tungle. I'll be speaking with them in the next week.

1,000 new iPhone APIs, but nothing for calendaring

Apple will publish 1,000 new APIs for the iPhone, but calendaring won't be one of them. Fabrizio Capobianco is outraged. I'll add my outrage. If Apple were to publish this API, we would get better calendaring options on the iPhone.

Inside the Facebook silo

Occasionally I peer into some new calendaring data silo. (There are so many!) Earlier this week, TechCrunch surveyed SocialCalendar and FriendEvent, calendaring apps inside of Facebook. If you and everyone you need to share with are never separated from Facebook, maybe these work for you? As for the rest of us, it looks like another data silo.

Welcome to NY Times readers

My "calendar users' bill of rights" premiered this morning in the New York Times online small business section. I've got more work to do on it, but thanks to David Strom, it's part of a larger conversation taking place on the Web.

The rise of calendar aggregators

Surely one piece of the puzzle called calendar sharing is aggregating many calendars into one. Jon Udell is working on one such calendar aggregator, his elmcity project, and one of his readers also brings a wiki-like aggregator, Calagator, to his attention. FuseCal and Upcoming also play in this area. Read Jon's post and comments on the post.