i'm biting the bullet and am going to try to manage my calendars on osaf.us.
some context: i have been using google calendar since it became available. i have one main calendar with 90% of my events, a calendar for my world of warcraft guild events, and a calendar for my movie club. all three calendars make extensive use of recurrence, especially my main calendar, which has stuff like "weekly on mon, tue, thu, fri ending in six weeks". i'm also subscribed to a calendar feed from upcoming.org and to a shared google us holidays calendar. since i can't subscribe to remote calendars in cosmo yet, i'm going to ignore the upcoming.org and holidays calendars. since google calendar can't subscribe to cosmo calendars for some reason (trying to work with google to figure that out), and several of the people in my guild and movie club use google calendar, i'm going to ignore those as well. so my task will be to get my main calendar into osaf.us, where i'll try the best i can to manually keep it in sync with google calendar. it would be nice if i could get the data from my main google calendar directly into my default Cosmo calendar, but cosmo doesn't give me any way to directly import events. so i used chandler to subscribe to my Cosmo calendar and then imported my google data into that collection and synced. i expected a dialog box with a progress bar and didn't get one; all i saw was the status bar saying "Syncing collection 'Cosmo'". i just switched weeks in the cosmo ui a lot until it looked like everything was done. one thing i've noticed so far is that switching weeks in the cosmo ui is pretty slow, on the order of 2-4 seconds. it's not clear how much of that time is spent fetching data from the server vs revivifying it into javascript vs rendering the ui updates, but it's definitely noticeable. and there are only 13 events this week. i also notice that for the recurring event noted above, cosmo tells me it occurs once, where chandler tells me that it's a custom recurrence "MoTuThFr every week until 3/30/07". it would be nice if cosmo could at least tell me that information, even if it didn't let me edit it. this made me think that i better doublecheck that syncing to cosmo didn't somehow detach the occurrences of this recurring event, so i popped over to the account browser. the Cosmo collection page was pretty slow as well, as it had to add a table row for every item in the collection; the table is not paged or sorted, and there is no way to get a count of items in the collection. at this point i realized that i didn't know the uuid of the event, so i clicked over to the "view as html" view of the collection. this page has the same paging and sorting problems. additionally, there are a bunch of events named "Boot Camp" in the calendar, representing various six-week sessions spanning the last eight months or so, which meant i had to search through the list for the specific "Boot Camp" event that had the right dates. and of course the dates shown on the page are just for the first occurrence of the recurring event, which was confusing at first, cos i was expecting the period to be the start of the first occurrence to the end of the last occurrence. if the calendar detail view had shown me the uuid of the event item, then i wouldn't have even had to go to the "view as html" view at all. but, lacking that, this is a handy view for finding a specific event to look at its attributes. having found the specific "Boot Camp" event i wanted, i clicked "view" to look at it in detail, and i verified that the recurrence rule was indeed what i expected (RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;WKST=SU;UNTIL=20070330T233000Z;BYDAY=MO,TU,TH,FR). so it's just the cosmo detail view that isn't showing me the fact that i have a "custom" recurrence rule. that would be nice to have. it would also be nice if the "view as html" page for an event described the recurrence rule in english. taking a step back for a sec, the whole "view as html" thing needs some thinking. both andre and i have observed that it's handy to be able to see event attributes in the account browser, both at the collection level (a few key attributes, like summary and period) and at the item level (all attributes). it's also nice to be able to look at the icalendar representation of an event item (and probably for tasks and notes as well). but do we really need separate pages just for this? also, the "regular" collection and item pages in the account browser need to be reorganized. i originally built them a long time ago when dav was the main focus of the server, and we had a very limited domain model, but we've since moved to a model that more closely resembles chandler, and the account browser pages need to reflect this shift. we probably want to list every item and note attribute, including "unknown" ones that are not a static part of our model but are defined by eim or dav clients, and every stamp with its attributes. we also need to reorganize how we provide links (both with and without tickets) for all the different protocols that can access a collection. think about the lengths that we went to for the calendar ui's collection details dialog - we need something similar here. that's it for now. i'm sure i'll find more issues as i enter data directly into osaf.us. i'm pleasantly surprised at how easy the whole experience was, though. kudos to everybody! _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
