How iPhone can drain my calendar swamp

As we get closer to the date of the iPhone SDK release, I've been thinking about just exactly what I'd like to see the iPhone be able to do to solve my family's calendar sharing problem.

I don't require full two-way syncing of iPhone calendar data with another calendar. My requirements aren't that strict, or complicated. Syncing is nice but technically it's more challenging than publish-and-subscribe, the very tech that lets most of you easily read Calendar Swamp.

Simply put, I would like to be able to have an iPhone publish its calendar -- securely, over the Internet -- to a private server. Virtual private network technology could do the job. The private server I want to have under my control. I'd even be willing to buy a Mac Mini to host this. But I don't want to store the published calendar on the Web. Such servers are vulnerable to data breaches, or Facebook-style privacy erosion and terms-of-service shenanigans.

I want to be able to query River's calendar to see her free/busy time. In return, River should be able to see my free/busy time. And no one else should ever be able to see any of it, for any reason, if we so choose.

I may have other, more public calendars, but they can wait. But at a time when I still wade through a lot of email to arrange meetings and such, it's worth a minute to discuss how I would prefer to invite and be invited by others to events in the scenario I'm describing.

The iPhone is the first handset I know of that can generate a calendar entry based on details it finds in an email. I've raved about this in the past as provided by Zimbra, and Google Calendar does it too. Calendars must be able to generate invitations that recipients can use in an automated fashion to begin entering the info in their own calendar. Requiring 100 percent manual reentry of info from an email into a calendar is a non-starter.

Sometimes, an iCal .ics file attached to the email does the job. Otherwise, if my calendar can generate an email that your email can then understand (like the iPhone, Zimbra, or Gmail) to generate the calendar entry with correct date, time and even location already filled out, that would be sufficient.

River isn't giving up her iPhone, so that has to be a part of the solution. If Apple and some combination of products and services can deliver what I need, I'll be happy to invest in the appropriate gear and services on my end.

How about a 2008 Calendar Swamp calendar?

Would anyone out there like to design the 2008 Calendar Swamp calendar? What better way to spread the gospel of interoperable calendars than to have our own. I'm thinking of offering a PDF through this blog that anyone could print out for free and display. If you have a knack for design and would like your work to be admired by the worldwide community of calendar swampers, please drop me a line at calendarswamp at gmail dot com.

My first calendar spam

I knew this day was coming. It's here. I just logged into my Yahoo Calendar and some spammer (on the BitTorrent_help Yahoo Group) figured out a way to place a spam calendar entry in my Yahoo calendar. Better yet, Bram Cohen, Mr. BitTorrent himself, announced in May 2005 that he was "shutting down this list" and that no further posting would be allowed! But I note that as of this morning, there are still 11,761 members of this group. Presumably every one of them could have received the same calendar spam. I unsubscribed from the group and advise others to do likewise.

Pocket Outlook APIs found

I came across a blog post by Randy Byrne, Outlook Program Manager at Microsoft, and he answered my question about where to find the Pocket Outlook APIs. It's the Pocket Outlook Object Model, described on MSDN. So now I'm curious to know what sorts of software programmers have built with these hooks into Pocket Outlook. They employ COM, which as I understand it is the kind of programming that's not for the faint of heart.

Windows Live Calendar: No synch to Outlook or Windows Mobile, for now

Kip Kniskern, writing in a review of the new Windows Live Calendar:

"There's no synch feature, of any kind, except for shared calendars. Not being able to synch to Outlook or mobile devices is a showstopper. However we've heard they are working on this, so stay tuned."

If my phone could do anything

About 1:43 into this new video, Nick Sears, the co-founder of Android, the company Google bought to build its mobile phone platform, has this to say:

"If my phone could do anything, it would be that we would have a shared family calendar."

To which I would add the following: through the service provider of my choice, or even without requiring a service provider, and supporting instant over-the-air updating with calendars on any other mobile device, including the iPhone.

Meanwhile, there's the Open Handset Alliance, another puzzle piece.

Evolution, Sunbird, Samsung tales of woe

TumTumblr writes:

"How is it possible that Evolution and Sunbird, which are regularly called 'Outlook replacements', are not able to export their files into things like the .VCS format which Outlook recognize, or even into some (why-would-I-care) perhaps non-standard erroneous but Outlook-compatible file format? How is someone supposed to sync between the two, short of setting up Microsoft Exchange crap?"

and also has this to say:

"Samsung seems to utterly and utterly fail at usability, interopability (even with the standard of Contacts/Calendering/e-mail, Microsoft Outlook). Shame. They do the rest so well."

Let the drumbeats roll...

Which Microsoft APIs access Pocket Outlook?

Say a developer wanted to access Pocket Outlook on Windows Mobile to create something new, like an app that shares calendar data with other calendars. Where do they look?

I don't think much about this question not only because I'm not a developer, but also because I never heard anyone say they avail themselves of such a thing. However...

If Windows Mobile is an open platform, such an API has to be available. Steve Ballmer, of all people, made me rethink this during his October 23 speech at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment in San Francisco. Quoting Steve (my emphasis in bold):

"We're investing very heavily in the device itself, and in the services around them as a platform. If you want to write a rich application, we have a version of .NET that runs on Windows Mobile phones that supports rich application development. If you want to write a thin client application, HTML, or AJAX, or eventually with our Silverlight technology which provides for rich media and video, those things will be available on this platform. We have rich APIs for things like forms and Web services, for location, for contact, calendar, messaging, maps, sound, graphics, all of that is available for third party innovation."

I attempted to learn more after Steve's speech from Microsoft's PR agency, but they didn't respond to my inquiry. Anyone reading this know what he's talking about?

Update: See my later post for the answer.

OpenSocial: Yep, another puzzle piece

I've read a fair amount already about OpenSocial without needing to comment on it here, but this comment by Brian Kellner of NewsGator caught my eye:

"OpenSocial will be able to answer other questions, such as what kind of activities have been done on a platform or it may know about calendar events and be able to pass on that intelligence."

GroupDAV: Another puzzle piece

From the home page of GroupDAV.org:

"GroupDAV is an effort to create a 'down-to-the-earth' protocol to connect OpenSource groupware clients with OpenSource groupware servers... GroupDAV has a very specific focus which is connecting the three popular OpenSource clients - Kontact, Evolution and Sunbird - with the broad range of OpenSource 'groupware' servers."

Work on GroupDAV started in 2004, so it's proceeding slowly. But there is a mailing list with a bit of activity on it. But it's not clear to me what its relationship is to CalDAV. This post, dating from 2005, sheds precious little light on that question.

Vista sync problems prompt some to retreat to XP

Jason Dunn: "Some people are having so many problems with Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) that they're actually leaving Windows Vista and and going back to Windows XP."

More Mac iCal liberation news

Yesterday Ben Brown clued me into NotMac, "a free, open-source utility for using the client-side dotMac services provided by Apple." Interesting that Dave Winer (or someone claiming to be him) contributed $100 toward its development.

This could be the thin end of a wedge that turns Apple's iCal calendaring services into an open standard that could be moved to any non-Apple platform. This might all happen much faster than the prospect of Apple reaching out to sync with non-Apple calendars.

In fairness to Apple, the next release of Mac OS X, called Leopard, will also help open up iCal to wider use. Quoting from this Apple developer Web page:

"The Calendar Store lets any application display, create, and edit iCal data."

BusySync gets a SwampDrain point

Gus Mueller, quoting from the BusySync Web site:

"BusySync lets you share iCal calendars with family and coworkers on a local area network without a dedicated server and with full read/write access."

I haven't given any SwampDrain points for a while. BusySync gets +1 SwampDrain point. Now if they could make it work with something on the Windows side, that would be peachy. MonoCalendar might be a good place to start.

The iPhone sync process could be simpler

Apple gets lots of flak for not syncing with non-Apple calendars, but even those who live entirely within the Apple world need simpler sync. Ben Brown writes:

"I don’t like that the iTunes sync does not fire off a chain of child-syncs for related applications. As it is, before I can even connect my iPhone, I have to open iCal and have it refresh all of my calendar subscriptions, then do a manual refresh on my Podcast subscriptions within iTunes. Then, after I connect the phone, I have to do a manual import in iPhoto for my photos. Why can’t that be one step?"

The curious case of Remember the Milk

Lots of folks -- myself included -- mistakenly described Remember the Milk as another online calendar. In fact, it only manages tasks. For calendaring, it syncs with Google Calendar. There's no conventional way in Remember the Milk to express events with start and end time. It's possible to express tasks of a certain duration that are due at a certain time. But it's not clear at all how you would do something as conventional as inviting someone else to the same "task" (event) unless, perhaps, that event originated in Gcal. Maybe I just need to play with it some more. And now I have a reason to do it. Remember the Milk just announced the ability to sync with Windows Mobile, for $25 a year. It's another tantalizing quarter-step forward for those of us who want to sync and publish our calendars sans Outlook or Google Calendar. (And Remember the Milk already works offline, so there's another thing in its favor.)

Oy vey: SyncML is now OMA DS

Never mind that synchronization has never been more popular, or more marketable to businesses. The fine folks at the Open Mobile Alliance renamed SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language) to this unmemorable alphabet soup: OMA DS (Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization). As if we don't have enough standards, we have to deal with old and new names! I will spell out the "DS" or no one will know what I'm talking about!

iPod Touch: Update contacts, not calendar?

I was surprised to learn (via Bill Palmer) that iPod Touch owners can add contacts, even though they can't add calendar entries. Why does Apple allow contacts updates but not calendar updates?

Everybody Has a Share

Calendar Swamp readers may find my new project worth following. Everybody Has a Share: Myth, Madness and Momentum in the Digital Decade is my book in progress about the historic impact of open source, open standards, security, and privacy on all of us. And yes, calendar sharing will be highlighted as a textbook example of the myth, madness and momentum. Join me there for the fun, starting today; but stay tuned for more reports from the swamp here.

Chandler hits preview release

News from Chandler, the open-source calendar software effort:

"The Chandler project has hit our Preview milestone! We now have public-beta quality releases of our products; we believe them to be full featured enough and stable enough for daily use."

Congratulations to the Chandler team. It's been a long time coming.

The Apple iPod Touch: Opportunity lost

Apple continues to treat its iCal calendar poorly. The new iPod Touch calendar is read-only, even though the iPod Touch would seem like a great way to update your calendar. Apple wants to sell more iPhones instead.