Calendar Program Suggestions?

[marcmagus]

I think I'm in search of a new calendaring application. gcal, while great, doesn't seem to support the features I really want (or needs a front-end I haven't yet discovered to do so). Here's my feature wishlist:

• Lets me store my data on my own computer. A tool which requires that I give some vendor all my data will lose points. A tool which does so and also doesn't allow me an easy way to replicate that data locally so I still have access to it in the event of connectivity issues (or the provider disappearing) will lose even more points.
• Is easily usable from the command-line within a terminal window for basic functionality. This includes both displaying the calendar in reasonable views and adding events to the calendar. For the latter, editing a file is acceptable as long as it's easy.
• Makes it easy to interrogate the calendar for things like "what do I have going on today/this week/this month/the second weekend in April/etc.?" and "When is that Passover thing happening again, anyway?"
• Does all the work of including holidays I might care about.
• Makes it easy to dump all of my data into it, but doesn't clutter its UI so much that I can't tell what's going on after I've done so. Should be able to easily visually distinguish the importance of the most important thing going on during a given time-period (day/hour/whatever).
• That means the UI needs to be able to know what my definitions of importance are.
• Should have support for existing open standards for calendaring, because this might be useful down the road (say for sending events to other people).
• In an ideal world, has a web-enabled front-end with access controls (or just one which is read-only). This should allow me to easily (ideally without any intervention at all) share my schedule with my friends. My schedule is busy enough with interesting stuff that for some reason it seems to me that there are people who'd be interested in seeing what I'm doing just to know about stuff that's going on. (This UI should also, at a minimum, be able to filter on some sense of importance so people aren't confronted with boring minutiae.)
• Again, it must be sufficiently usable that I will actually use it. Usable is here defined as requiring a minimum of effort for tasks I want to perform while allowing me to perform any task I reasonably want to. In particular, I have to bother to enter every event into it as I become aware of the event, and I have to bother to check the calendar regularly.
• A bonus feature might be allowing others to enter (provisional) events for me. This could work with the open standard support mentioned above.

Any suggestions? Just as Hiveminder has been great for helping me dump tasks I want to do someday somewhere central and not have to worry about forgetting about them indefinitely (and is also handy for things I need to do more immediately), I'd like something which helps me keep track of what I've promised to/hope to do when so I'm aware of potential conflicts sooner.

(Incidentally, hm fails the not requiring me to give someone else my data test. This is something I forgive them for partly because they apologize for it. If I find something which gives all the functionality I use without that requirement, I might switch to it.)

Comments

[thorog.livejournal.com]

*subscribes to this post*

I'm currently using GCal as well (iCal just....doesn't do it for me, for some reason. Also, not as portable), and I agree that there's stuff it needs to do. I have command-line read access (open APIs for the win), but no write, but that doesn't count because I had to make it myself. Additional features I'd like:

• The ability to limit events by "zone" or environment or some similar term. E.g. I can enter dates that university starts and ends, creating a University zone. I can then define events that happen within this zone only (e.g. lectures, group meetings, etc). While this isn't supported explicitly in the iCalendar standard (IIRC), it's easily simulated by the event's (somewhat underused, even on GCal/iCal) repeat properties.
  
• The ability to modify multiple events at once. Sometimes you can't get what you want by repeating an event, and you want five events to all be in the same calendar, in the same location, etc.

These are both things I'm going to be missing in about three days, when I receive my university schedule.

[marcmagus]

I'm using gcal (or Gcal, according to the man page), not GCal (if by that you mean Google Calendar). It's not my fault Google starts with the same initial letter as GNU and thus creates confusion. It is Google's fault.

gcal offers command-line read trivially (that's what it is), and stores data in a simple rc file. I usually add events by opening that in an editor, but a quick alias would append a new event to the rc for writes.

Wow, your "zone" idea (is it sufficient to think of it as an alias for bounds on a repeat?) is a really clever ui improvement. I like it.

I'd also like to see support for "tags", because I currently think they're the hottest UI feature of the decade.

[thorog.livejournal.com]

Ah, right. Yes, I did. 'g' is obviously the new 'i' (much like 'i' was the new 'e') for prefixing software.

The zone is pretty much that - it just determines when an event stops and starts. I get tired of entering the same date for the end of a repeat when I have eight classes to process. And then repeating them for terms 2, 3 and 4.

Tags wouldn't be bad. I could see uses for tags for, say, events other people put on your calendar, tentative events, etc. I currently just used calendars in Google Calendar, since they dictate reminders for events. SMS reminders are the best thing ever, because over here receiving an SMS doesn't cost you a cent.

mouse solutions

[shogunsquirrel.livejournal.com]

hey- I sent you an IM. I'm not sure what e-mail you're checking these days, but I'd like to put you in touch with a friend of mine who uses Linux and has creative, possibly ergonomic, mouse solutions. Drop me a line.