peliom (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} peliom) wrote,@ 2005-11-12 12:35:00 |
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| Current mood: |  anxious |
| Entry tags: | calendar, osx |
The Principle of Command-Tab
What is an application? I find that for the Power OSX user, an application is an icon, something you can switch to quickly and do something useful. Of course there are the traditional applications that are huge and with massive functionality (Final Cut Pro, Microsoft Word, XCode, etc). But often wrapping a service in an "application" gives a huge boost in usability.
Here is an example that came about when I tried to create something that makes it easier to keep track of events. Or as jwz would say, "how are we going to get laid?".
The first thing to note is that things to do are transient. They happen in different places in different times, are not repeatable events, and therefore entering them into applciations like iCal is a bit of a pain. Calendar apps are business oriented pieces of groupware goo. Very useful for what they are meant for, but annoying to use for social purposes. The workflow or events is like this: you hear about the event somehow, then you try not to forget about it, and then you try to go on the actual day it happens. In iCal this means:
* Receive event notification in email (this is the usual case)
* Switch to iCal, create new event
* Munge around with mail window and iCal window, because ical is a big window and it's hard to read the information and type it in while they overlap
* Enter the useful information: title, date, time (usually 6pm, 8pm, 10pm or all night), place and a URL
Now that is not so bad, and if you go through the pain of setting up WebDAV, or pay for .Mac, you can sync this calendars among your various macs and so can your friends.
But doing the above for 10-20 events every week is a pain. Really all you want to is have a flat text file and type into it like this:
11/25/05 10pm Supper Club 657 Harrison 11/29/05 6pm INFORUM IDEO CEO 12/03/05 7pm INFORUM The Tribe 401 Van Ness 12/08/05 6pm INFORUM Iraq Soldiers
A nice bonus would be to hyperlink those lines so you can click on them to get the full story.
Here is where the OSX application piece comes in. I created a CGI script to manage the above text file on a public web server. This allows anyone to view the list, and makes it easy to enter events. I created an application called myCal and it looks like this:
To enter an event, you just type everything on one line. (I haven't shown it in the text field but the input is exactly as the lines in the webview below, except with a URL tacked on the end). The line begins with a date and that is used as a sort key. The rest of the line is free text, you just type in the title and enter the approximate time if necessary. At the end, you can type optionally type a comma and then paste in a URL that will be used to hyperlink the event line.
This is one of those cases where relaxing input restrictions can make something a whole lot easier. Now when I am going through my email entering events, it is done in a user centric way. I just type in the bare minimum and it gets recorded to a public place on the 'net with backup. The list is sorted for me. What I hope to do next is add functionality to convert the event list to iCalendar format. Then people can subscribe to that file and see in iCal. The bottom line is iCal is nice pretty candy and does the meetings thing well, but it's not much fun for inputing a bunch of events that you probably won't go to anyway.
TODO: rajlist integration!
