[Design] Calendar ideas

[Tim Randolph]

First off -- Thanks, Mitch!  What a wonderful way to invest your 
energy.  May OSAF be a great success and produce tools that millions 
can use and love.

A few ideas for the calendar:

First, break the paradigm of a monolithic calendar.  iCal really nailed 
this.  Instead of having one "personal" calendar that can be 
categorized, it is much more elegant to have an arbitrary number of 
calendars to cover discrete parts of one's life, that can be overlayed 
depending on the needs of the user.  Right now, I have work, home, kids 
school, and birthday calendars that I created and maintain, and I have 
subscribed to  US holidays calendar.  This also makes it much, much 
simpler to see the information I need at a given time and to share 
calendar information in a focused way.

Having calendars chunked this way also begs for the ability to allow 
multiple editors of any given calendar.  This is something that iCal 
cannot do.  My wife can subscribe to the birthdays calendar, but she 
cannot edit it.  This raises all sorts of fundamental questions about 
P2P connectivity, and security and permissions.  How much have these 
areas been thought through?

Finally, it would be really nice if there was calendar access to the 
data streams that the rest of the app generates.  Look at any weblog 
page now, including the OSAF's.  There is a calendar that allows users 
to navigate the entries by date.  If Chandler could synthetically build 
multiple calendars based on user activity, then the calendar would be 
very useful as an archive instead of simply as a planning tool.  If the 
weblog calendar idea is abstracted just a little, it could be easy for 
users to build mini-applications that track any data over time. As far 
as I know, I can't I use Outlook or Notes to track my work time or  
even to keep meeting minutes organized by date.

If I remember the iCalendar spec, the vjournal component should be able 
to handle the calendar-as-archive use cases fairly gracefully.

--Tim