Alarms: A Deceptively Simple Calendar Tool

I saw a mention about Alarms, a new Mac OS X take on calendars.

The UX is based on a bell-shaped toolbar icon, which opens a top-of-screen calendar when clicked, pushing down and graying out other running apps:

click to enlarge

The app presents a left to right scrolling arrangement of hours. You can click anywhere and create an event, and at the time that the time for that event reaches ‘Now’ (as time passes the hours move to the left), an alarm goes off. This includes a blinking display of the alarm icon, and various tones can be selected too.Note that selecting a date on the calendar to the right allows other days to be displayed, and then the same calendar UI is presented but for that date.

An alarm can be created by dragging a URL to the icon, which opens the calendar display. You can then drop the URL on the time that you’d like to do something, like responding to an email (after grabbing the email URL), or writing a post (after drag-and-dropping the piece’s URL). I’ve even grabbed images and dragged them to the tool.

When the alarm goes off, the display pops a small display, and the URL can be accessed, or the alarm checked.

There is a keystroke setting to snooze tasks, and one for opening/closing the alarms calendar.

There is a deceptively important integration with iCal:

  1. Since iCal tasks may be shared, it is possible to use that mechanism to share alarms, so long as both (all) users have Alarms installed. But there is no way to only sync some alarms, so all must be shared.
  2. iCal serves as an archive for alarms when synced, while in Alarms, checked off tasks disappear. This alone justifies taking the five minutes to set up syncing. Unchecking tasks in the synced iCal calendar makes them current again in Alarms, too.
  3. URL tasks can have their text fields edited in iCal, which can’t be done in Alarms.

Thoughts

My calendaring is all over the place right now. I use Google Calendar for scheduled events, like calls and meetings, and until recently I used Remember The Milk to track larger scale activities, but that app’s biggest benefit is integration with Gmail and it breaks every time Google updates the tool. That makes it pathologically annoying.

I have been experimenting with CRM capabilities of some of the products reviewed in the Streams In Business research project (which I am finishing up this week, I swear!). But the jury is out on that larger scale coordination.

On the finer grained, moment-to-moment task management, Alarms is appealing. It’s faster than writing a note to yourself, and much faster than creating an event in iCal. It’s conceivable that it might even take over the more traditional schedule-a-telcon sort of task, but I think to edge into that region it would have to integrate email invitations, and a number of other features. If the developers behind Alarms could do that, and still keep it small and simple, it would be a real winner.

related articles

Google Calender - Sharable and Easy to Use

Got the tip off that Google had finally released the beta of it’s long-awaited Calendar fromCNET News.com’s Elinor Mills.

I took a look, and it seems a fully functional but fairly austere and clean design, and incorporates nearly everything I would want in an online calendar: multiple calendars, import and export of calendars, iCal support, alerts/notifications (including to cell phone), public/private calendar events, invitation system that is well integrated to Gmail.

There’s talk of future integration with Upcoming.org, so that publicizing events will be easy.

But a few big things I was hoping to see are not there:

  1. Gmail style labels, or tags — I wanted to be able to label events in the calendar with the same sort of tags that Gmail supports, and, even better, I was hoping for an integrated view of events, chats, and events based on those tags. Would be killer!
  2. RSS feeds from the calendars — there is mention of XML associated with calendars, so maybe that’s code for RSS, but there is nothing about it in the help docs. More to follow.
  3. Mobile access looks to be limited to SMS notifications. I really want direct access to the calendar through my mobile web access, like the equivalent Gmail service.
  4. Gtalk presence — why not? If I am looking at an upcoming event, why not have the same Gtalk buddylist pawn for invitees that supports emailing or chatting with them?

And of course, they would release this the week that I am using my son’s Ibook. I don’t have access to my real iCal, and I can’t import my calendar in and fool with it. A First Look will have to wait until the weekend.

30 Boxes beta on February 5th

I am joining in the chorus of praise for 30 Boxes (along with Scoble, Thomas Hawk (who calls it the best calendar ever), Matt Mullenweg, and Om, who called 30 boxes the gmail of calendars) even though I have only fooled with it for a few hours. I posted about it a few days ago, but just based on others’ thoughts. But now I have gotten access to the beta (thanks Narendra!)

In the past few months I have fiddled with a long list of online calendar tools — Plaxo, Planzo, Kiko, Airset, and Trumba — but I haven’t connected with any of them. Mostly because I am looking for a calendar tool to pull together the various unconnected elements of a digital life, not to simply replace a Filofax.

30 Boxes is at an incomplete stage, but what there is is dead-on. Especially the social element.

In this screenshot (click to expand), I have clicked on a particular day, and all the timestamped elements of my digital world are pulled in: blog posts, Flickr photos, and I had hoped to see recent music played from Last.fm, but I had some sort of RSS snafu. (Along the way I discovered that my favorite geoloco app, Plazes.com, does not provide an RSS feed for my peregrinations, which is dumb.)

But also notice the stuff that my new buddy, Thomas Hawk, has incorporated into his calendar which I am including into mine. This is where it gets interesting.

30Boxes allows users to tag events, which would perhaps be cool all on its own. However, when you are setting up the sharing filters for friends getting access to you calendar, you can restrict access to those events tagged with specific terms. For the members of a project team, you can grant access only to events with the project name tag, for example. Or you can show your karate events to other karateka from your dojo. Or family events to family.

There’s a long shopping list of missing things — scheduling meetings, iCal subscribe and publish, RSS feeds, inward filters (I might want to only see certain things from Thomas’ calendar, even if he is giving me everything), javascript (for embedding calendars into blogs and other websites), search, and groups (all members of a team could be managed at once) — but what is there is good.

And of course, I still want the Nerdvana buddylist view: where the various posts, pictures, and events associated with my friends are displayed as attributes hanging off an instant messaging style buddylist, and my attributes and presence info are displayed to them in their buddylists. But I bet I will have to wait for Yahoo, Google, MSN, or AOL to provide that for me.