A word about Skylight

I've seen the ads, heard the reviews. If this is calendar interoperability nirvana, with a dash of AI, it didn't come cheap. The industry failed the rest of us.

Overloaded women need shared calendars but vendors need to step up -- still!

 "One local mum I know says a shared calendar has helped her and her partner both be across their weekly schedule without each having to check in with the other. Another couple of two children organise the extracurricular schedules of one child each, which involves researching, booking and transporting them to it. For this type of organisation to work, they say regular communication is key."

Did you catch the need for a shared calendar? We should demand truly shareable calendars, not calendars that lock us into a particular platform. My message for nearly 20 years has been this message.

TidyCal

This blog has always been about calendar and schedule sharing, but apparently, Calendly pioneered something called the calendar management and scheduling category. Now there's a Calendly competitor called TidyCal. Here's a review. Free to try, $29 for lifetime access. Advanced stuff requires programming skills, and as always, who knows if the API access included today will always be there. History says it will end someday.

That calendar-sharing service you use may be harvesting your personal scheduling data for artificial intelligence purposes

A Facebook friend of mine just posted that "Calendly is now data harvesting for 3rd party AI features. Guess it's time to cancel it."

Read those privacy policy updates closely folks.

CalDAV remains the standard, but compliance still varies

Around the 1:55:00 mark, this week's Windows Weekly podcast hosts discuss CalDAV, but we are reminded that although CalDAV is a standard, complaince various from product to product, and implementation to implemenation, discouraging adoption and use.

David Mills, R.I.P.

I never met David Mills, but like you I've been a beneficiary of his work, which underlies calendar and schedule sharing on the internet, and a whole lot more. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols just wrote an obituary about David.

Cupla rates five shared calendar apps for couples - you'll never guess who won

I guess it's okay to do this kind of marketing these days. Cupla, which I just posted about, posted a comparison of five different shared calendar apps. Of course, Cupla's own app wins. Your milage might vary. Also, some of these are free AND ad-free. So exactly how do they make money?

A romantic shared calendar for iOS and Android

Romance is in the air - courtesy of a new shared calendar app called Cupla, featured in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. It's $2.50 per person per month. I hope their privacy policy keeps it privacy-safe and ad-free. There's a two-week free trial available. No word on a thruple version.

Long lost and lamented: private, portable calendars

Last Sunday's episode of Ask the Tech Guys (#2006) includes an interesting discussion about the fact that most modern mobile calendars have some sort of cloud component. In particular, Windows users have to use cloud-enabled Outlook to sync with the iPhone calendar. The long-gone, long-lamented Palm Pilot arrangement came up. It predates the cloud and the sync between the Palm Desktop and Palm OS never shared your data with data sellers or brokers. The hosts couldn't name a modern equivalent. (Although, if you have a Mac paired with that iPhone, it's cloud-free calendaring, correct? Anyway, check it out starting at the 1:22:51 time stamp.

A tribute to Dave Thewlis

Dave Thewlis retired early this year as executive director of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, on whose board I serve for several years. Back in January, CalConnect wrote a tribute to Dave. I offer my own belated congratulations to Dave for a lifetime of service to the calendaring and scheduling community, which basically includes all of us.

Tools for time zone management

No sooner do people start talking about sharing calendars and schedules, then they have to deal with time zones. This Wall Street Journal story from February 2023 offers some tips.

Calender privacy 101

From February 2023: The horror of realizing everyone can see your work celandar entries.

Yes there are ways to prevent this from happening!

R,I.P. Ribose

Calendar sharing continues to decline outside of Big Tech silos. I just received an email that Ribose is shutting down on November 1.

More calendar helper - ad infinitum

So email is email and it pretty much works. But calendar and schedule sharing remains something that often requires Buying Something Else.

Google Calendar - Outlook love

I don't use either Google Calendar or Outlook, so I don't care much aboutr this news item from May. But what about you? Is this a breakthrough?

Google Calendar gets improved interoperability with Outlook

iPhone-Android love. But calendaring love?

The Wall Street Journal says it's all love between iPhone and Android. But they left out calendaring and scheduling from this August 2022 story. I bet that's still not so lovey-dovey (unless you use Outlook on both, ugh).

Client-side encryption in Google Calendar

 Will this impact interoperablity? This story does not say. 

Excuse me!!! Steve Martin suffers with Apple treatment of time zones

Well-known banjo player Steve Martin appeared on Leo Laporte's The Tech Guy radio show on November 19, 2022, where among other things he complained about the way Apple treats time zones in iCalendar. Transcript Podcast

Calender spam pours into Google Calendar

Android Police has the story: "Apparently, the crafty integration that lets Google Calendar automatically create events based off of certain hooks in your Gmail messages has gone haywire for a number of users."

Etiquette of calendar-scheduling services

I just came across this February 2022 essay in the Wall Street Journal about the etiquette of calendar scheduling. It's probably true that people care more about how you try to share calendars, rather than just the fact that you can do so.