Sunday, July 22, 2007

Sunbrid Recant (or searching for a browser-based iCal Replacement)

So once again I'll recant on on a previous blog.

Sunbird is crap. Events mysteriously get created and can't be deleted. Or get deleted, period. Or something weird happens with the interface. It never crashed, though. But it was annoying enough to stick with iCal.

So what I really want is a entirely browser-based iCal/Google Calendar-like tool (that means Javascript, and I'm not a Javascript programmer) tool that allows me to:

  • Drag (and eventually drop) activity across a daily schedule for stuff I work on.
  • Remember/autosuggest project names
  • Export events to some standard format, iCal or XML, YAML, or whatever
  • Summarize project activity by week/month/totoal

    Yeah this probably could be done in Rails/Django but I don't want that. No databases. No webservers, but still browser based. Am I crazy? Creating a Dojo Calendar has promise, but it requires server side code. What I want is something self contained like TiddlyWiki. Where the data is all stored in the .js and can be moved around and modified.

    Since I'm obviously in over my head (what else is new) this is obviously something I wouldn't want to start from scratch, but what next? Should I look at GWT or better yet pyjamas to avoid Java development? Obviously this would be (relatively) trivial to do as a traditional desktop GUI app but that is no fun.
    The key is needs to be portable, lightweight, usable off line. Somebody else had to have run across this sort of problem (and solved it) before. We'll see what happens.
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