Fitting Slashdot Into Your Schedule

droleary writes "Looking for more ways to fit the new iCal into your life, or just a way to check web site updates without it looking like you're not working? Well Subsume Technologies has just announced a cool new way to do it: wCal. You can subscribe to frequently updated calendars that are headlines of (hopefully a growing number of) web sites, including a constant-refresh-ending Slashdot: Apple calendar (the press release has the subscribe link)." I first heard of this idea from Morbus Iff back on Sept. 11, and am still not convinced of the utility, but it's an interesting idea. Maybe it will catch on.

Yet another web-based PIM?

[hlh_nospam]

I have shied away from putting my appointment calendars and client contact information on the web, and I don't see any compelling reason to start. I've already seen arbitrary changes in so-called "privacy" terms & conditions.

I would like to see something a little better than the date app than shipped with my PDA, though.

This won't help

[RedWolves2]

I spend all day reading and replying to the comments. Will this tool tell me when there is a new comment? God can you think of the bandwidth killer this could be.

News Ticker "Calendar"?

[amichalo]

I don't know about this - It's a calendar program, not a news ticker. This smacks of iPods with calendaring too - it CAN be done but should it, and doesn't it dilute the PURPOSE of the application - forcing one day for the iCal team to have to add features (or be blamed later) that are out of scope from the start.

I recall hybrid Spring PCS cell phone/MP3 players and other such monsters. iCal is just getting started, I would hate to see it morph into a non-focused application.

Re:News Ticker "Calendar"?

[Triv]

I actually LIKE having my calendars on my iPod - it reminds me where my classes are, what my girlfriend's work/class schedule is if I'm meeting her somewhere and what homework I have due without the extra weight of a PDA. YMMV, of course, but I think it's a cute little addition that makes my life a little bit easier. Now if it could only record our conversations so I'd have the same stunningly accurate "But you said..." memory that she has I'd be set. :)

Triv

Overly Convoluted

[h0tblack]

Interesting use and integration of standard technologies (iCalender, WebDAV and RDF) but it seems like an overly complex way of checking news-feeds. I'll stick with using SlashDock [mac.com] and NetNewswire [ranchero.com].

Re:Overly Convoluted

[droleary]

Interesting use and integration of standard technologies (iCalender, WebDAV and RDF) but it seems like an overly complex way of checking news-feeds.

Where's the complexity you speak of? You click a subscribe link and you're done! Yes, there are other RSS feeds out there, but I don't see how this is any more convoluted than having to run an app on every machine that goes out to various servers, grabs their RSS feed, parses it locally, and displays it in a proprietary format. The only way this could be less convoluted is if the sites provided the calendars themselves.

Re:Overly Convoluted

[h0tblack]

It's not that wCal is not easy to use, it's that it is itself a convoluted and overly complex solution to the most common use of RSS/RDF feeds. Apps like SlashDock are great as they give an unobtrusive and simple way of keeping up to date with many feeds at once. If you want a more powerful solution then there are plenty of heavier RSS/RDF readers out there. Mixing news feeds and appointments/scheduling seems like an odd idea to me, especially if your iCal gets cluttered with updates and news from even just a few regularly updated sites.

Now, using the old adage to "Think Different" wCal may well prove more promising. If we think of alternative uses of RSS (ie not just catching up with general site updates) say events that happen less frequently (maybe subscribing to software updates for the apps you use) then I can see wCal becoming a more viable solution. This could be done with their own Calander, but the 'auto-conversion' that wCal gives from RSS to iCalender may be preferable to some.

I'd be interested to hear exactly what your plans are for wCal and what you see it's primary uses as being. The technology merge is interesting, I'm sure there are possibilities for your software, but turning iCal into a news feed reader certainly isn't one of them IMHO.

Re:Overly Convoluted

[droleary]

Mixing news feeds and appointments/scheduling seems like an odd idea to me, especially if your iCal gets cluttered with updates and news from even just a few regularly updated sites.

If you've used iCal for any length of time, you'd know that individual calendars are easy to turn on and off. Additionally, if you show the search results area, everything comes out in a nice timeline list, so the visual clutter isn't necessarily a factor. The biggest usability issue I see right now is that iCal 1.0 is slow, but I'd think Apple would address that in future releases.

I'd be interested to hear exactly what your plans are for wCal

Plans? Nobody said there needed to be plans! :-)

and what you see it's primary uses as being.

The reason it initially came about is because I though it was odd that there wasn't a way to get information on new calendars from within iCal itself. Finding iCalShare has an RSS feed just clicked everything into place. Then it because a question of what other sites I could apply it to. No, it's not going to fit every site. In general, I suppose you could say I see it like the email of RSS feeds where things like SlashDock and NetNewsWire are the IRC. iCal is not as demanding of your attention; I like that.

So where to go from here? Hell if I know! It just seemed that people were only seeing calendars as something humans entered and edited, just the same way they saw sites as HTML pages before offering RSS feeds. I want light bulbs to start turning on in peoples heads and think about what else you can do with the software. No, iCal wasn't probably intended to display web site headlines, and it wasn't intended to schedule at/cron processes either, but it would sure be interesting if it could . . . :-)

Re:Overly Convoluted

[h0tblack]

I'm aware of being able to turn calendars on and off etc, it's just that for the purpose of regularly updated feeds, I'd say the calendar would still get crowded (it's very easy to get comments from the same feed overlapping etc).
Thanks for the further background info, interesting indeed, I'd say you should think about adding some more of the thought sbehind wCal to the site :-)
I have no idea if it will go anywhere, but it's definitely nice to see imaginative uses of technology, if for no other reason than just because!

Re:Use the right tool for the job: RSS

[droleary]

RSS is a much easier format to use, and there's already much easier, much better tools like Slashdock that take advantage of RSS without being unweildy (as this seems to be).

Uh, it does use the RSS feed to generate the calendar. You need only look in the ics file to see:

PRODID:com.subsume.rssCal-1.0.0a

As for the "unwieldy" comment, how cumbersome is it really to click a subscribe link? I also see an advantage to having headlines listed "as they happen" in an app that's used throughout the day instead of having to navigate Dock menus to see what's new. It all comes down to personal preference, of course, and nobody is expecting you to use a wCal if you don't want to.