iWant iCalendar

I really don’t make many phone calls. At all. I’m not doing much mobile e-mail of-late either.

It’s not that I’m a particularly anti-social sort (honest!) it’s just that my current project keeps me in an office surrounded by the people I need to speak to routinely. Similarly as I’m commuting by car to this client I’m doing less browsing on the move (they really frown on that on the M25).

Not much of a start to an SMS Text News post, but there is a point here… My work-day has changed and I’m appreciating a different side to my mobile day: specifically calendaring. The project I’m working on is just starting up – there’s literally hundreds of clients, suppliers, sub-contractors and team members arranging meetings, briefings, reviews and interviews and it’s a challenge to remember where I should be and when. My E61’s home screen maps out my day and I furtively glance at it during meetings to see if anything new has been added since I was last at my desk…

So?

Perhaps I’ve been spoilt, but e-mail and browsing by mobile no-longer really feels like a second-class experience as it did a few years back with my first company-provided XDA. Sure, it’s different to the big-screen laptop experience, but not worse or (much) slower. So it’s frustrating, as I come to rely on it so much more, to feel so limited by my mobile calendaring…

The basics work well – either the E61 or the iPhone both present clear and useful views and manipulating individual items of my primary calendar is simple enough, but I feel like I’m wearing blinkers… I have calendar tunnel-vision. On the desktop I have my team’s calendars side-by-side on screen – I can see who’s going where and can often tell more about a meeting from the cluster of diary bookings than the published agenda. It’s a kind of crude visualisation of my data. Outside of work too, I’m a bit of a calendaring nut pulling in all the information I need… My Mac has all the obvious stuff added in – public holidays downloaded from Apple’s own repository, but also stuff more specific to me: school holidays and the local college’s term dates are useful to know when the local roads and trains will be busy (it makes a huge difference). Also, I’ve also got the match calendar of the local rugby team (who’s stadium is opposite my home) and the events schedule of the Twickenham Stadium – an 80,000-seater venue which is a popular music venue and the home ground for English Rugby which is nearby – when it’s an major event day the roads are closed and you can’t go anywhere fast…  Flights, hotels and travel bookings are also imported directly from my Tripit feed.

All of this information is imported into my desktop calendaring programs by subscribing to iCalendar feeds – the calendar equivalent of a blog’s RSS feed. Much of it is published directly in that format – Google Calendar has been a saving grace here allowing people to easily create and publish community event details – and for the remainder I use Yahoo Pipes to scrape web pages and transform data into iCal format.  With more and more services adding the feature I’m increasingly able to subscribe direct – to friend’s availability (from a Plaxo ‘busy’ feed) or their travel plans from Dopplr.  It’s becoming mainstream…!

So why can’t I handle these feeds properly on my mobile devices? Exchange synchronisation on my E61 (via Roadsync or Mail for Exchange) can’t process or add this type of data. iTunes sync for the iPhone does copy this data (if selected), but it’s presented indistinguishable from my regular calendar items.  I want the same choices of presentation and the option to subscribe directly…  I want options to import reminders or just to view reminders. I want it done… properly.

Dear Jim,

Please could you fix it for me to have proper calendar support in my mobiles. I’m not really sure what’s going on at the moment.

Regards,

Ben