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.

Microsoft "solutions" come and go

Just another cloudy day in the walled garden.

Microsoft May Be Planning To Discontinue This Meeting-Coordination Service

Fixing calendaring for fun and profit -- yet again. We pay the bill.

Over on Facebook, Brad Kellmeyer writes: "Marissa Mayer's venture Smart Contacts is moving into Facebook's first office location. The world’s most advanced, intuitive contact manager. Good vibes? Marissa Mayer built her career at big companies reliant on digital advertising, initially at Google and later as CEO of Yahoo. But in her first startup, Sunshine, Mayer has opted to go in the opposite direction. Sunshine plans to charge consumers for subscriptions to generate revenue for its products, which will start with a contact management app and evolve to include appointment scheduling, event hosting and other apps, she told attendees of The Information’s Future of Startups Conference."

My comment: We’ve been waiting for scheduling and calendar interoperability for the length of the history of the Internet. Instead, we get this 💩 again and again.

Oh and here's the wide-eyed story from the "award-winning journalism" of The Information.

6 Tools to Sync Microsoft Outlook With Google Calendar

 From November 2021: 6 Tools to Sync Microsoft Outlook With Google Calendar.

Memo to self: People expect default meeting details are in the siloed calendar

A shift happened during the pandemic, and I'm just now realizing it.

Before, if I put my phone number in a Google Calendar invitation, people would expect to call me, or perhaps to have me call them.

After, Google Calendar sets up a Google Meet location, and that's where people expect me to be.

Between Zoom, MS Teams and Google Meet, my laptop is a mess of siloed meeting spaces.

A funny meme that isn't so funny considering the sorry state of calendar and schedule interop

I haven't posted here in quite some time, mostly because the sort of calendaring and scheduling interoperability I advocated for in decades past is no closer to happening. The swamp remains full. But this meme hit a nerve for me.

If we had accepted and adopted calendaring and scheduling standards that weren't vendor-specific, there's no reason every GPS wouldn't be able to fill in the context at a given destination.

When the itch we want to scratch goes on itching for 15 years or more, it descends into memetic farce.