I’m wondering if anyone has a technology solution for creating a merged calendar for home use.
Right now, there’s a scheduling problem on the homefront because my fiancee and I continuously run into schedule conflict. Between my gigging and her social scheduling, we always run into problems. It results in one of us canceling a committment.
I’m hoping there’s a way to merge our personal calendars into a master household calendar. Updated daily. Able to be accessed and altered externally.
Ideas?
Well…
It won’t really matter once you get married. She’ll just break your will and you’ll just do whatever she wants all the time anyway.
——– Visit my blog, eh! The Murphy Maphia
Good solutions
If you have two Palm handhelds, you can synchronize your calendars using DateBk5. I really like the app, and you can set it up so your spouse’s calendar shows up in a different color than yours. Given how cheap some of the Palms are now, that’s a nifty solution. Meet up, give her a hug, sync your calendars.
Also, there are a bunch of iCal-based products. If you use a Mac, Mac’s calendar app lets you automatically publish stuff.
Also, Mozilla’s SunBird calendar project is looking promising.
You can also pencil stuff in on a shared calendar on the wall at home 🙂 Lower-tech, but easier to use…
—
Matthew P. Barnson
color coded!
I love my palm, at this stage in life, it’s my brain. If I forget where I set it….
I use a Palm Tungsten E. It does have some problems with time, but the thing I like best about it is that I can put my activities by color. Home INteriors, red, personal, light blue, school event, dark blue, birhtdays, purple, etc. When Matt lets me know we have an event coming up, I put it in. There have been plenty of times that we go our separate ways to events scheudled, but it’s agreed upon and planned in advance.
I’m sure there are plenty of other PDA’s on the market better than the Tungsten E that also can do color coded calendaring. (I don’t recommend you buy a Tunsten E.)
If you use a regular calendar on the wall, I still encourage color coding so that nothing is overlooked among the pencil marks!
Good luck! —
Christy
There is a solution
Really, the best solution for this sort of problem is parenthood. The notion of a social life or extracurricular activities becomes so secondary when you are consumed with scoring the right infant formula at Costco or solving the great debate of Pampers vs. Huggies.
But, hey, that’s just my two cents, which should be understood is coming from my sleep-deprived state after watching the Pope coverage this morning with the 14-month old who decided she wanted to be up with Daddy at 4:30 am.
And just an aside – how about those Nationals! 2-1 with 40 hits in 3 games. Tied for 1st in the division, too.
The opposite
My experience has been exactly the opposite. Maybe it has to do with the ages of our children at 9, 7, 3, and 1. Dance class, choir, church, school, tee-ball, activities, rehearsals, performances, trips to town to buy important stuff, paydays, and more…
It gets overwhelming. The way we appear to have solved the problem at our house is that Christy keeps track of all the social calendar events, and I tell her about stuff I want to do so several weeks (preferably) in advance so she can fit it in. If there’s a conflict, we sit down and work it out. Usually, we can come to an amicable solution, though there have been a few heavily-debated decisions.
We also designate two nights so that they we know that they are not up for grabs. We try hard never to schedule anything else on:
I remember vividly at work once, telling a co-worker, “Look, I really have to leave on time today. I have a hot date tonight, and I don’t want to miss it.”
He replied, with incredulity, “Dude, you’re married! What do you think you’re doin’?.” After I explained that the date was with my wife, he was even more incredulous. He said he hadn’t gone on a date with his wife since before they were engaged 11 years earlier. And the idea was weird to him.
Anyway, she’s our family’s personal shared calendaring application, and does an amazing job at it!
—
Matthew P. Barnson
ICal
Sam,
ICal would be the way to go, but I believe it requires having access to a website you can upload and download to. What happens is that you set up a WebDAV enabled website and upload your calendars there. Then whatever calendaring software you use will “subscribe” to that website and download calendars as they appear.
What calendaring software do you use now? And on what platform?
For more info, so a search on iCal. My $.02 Weed
WebDav
WebDav… -shudders-
——– Visit my blog, eh! The Murphy Maphia
Software & Platforn
Weed, between our 3 computers…
I’m on Outlook 2000 and Palm OS for the handheld. She’s on Outlook 200x and Blackberry. All 3 systems run Windows XP.
Great call on iCal (http://www.apple.com/ical/), but it looks like iCal is out as solution because it’s only for Macs. Also, not sure the solution warrants me paying for a .Mac account just to get access to a WebDAV server.
One of my buddies set up an online calendar for shared use, but everything had to be manually entered. Maybe there’s a business opportunity in all this for Windows users?
really
I’m actually surprised there’s not a really good shared calendar solution for Drupal. For those of you wondering what Drupal is, you’re using it now.
——– Visit my blog, eh! The Murphy Maphia
“Event”
Well, there’s “Event”, but that’s really half-done. It tells you when something’s coming, but yeah. There’s a WebCalendar wrapper in CVS, but even that doesn’t handle two-way Palm synchronization at all…
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Groupware
There’s a few groupware options on Freshmeat.net that provide shared calendars along with many, many other options. So you have to buy the kitchen to get the blender.
Perhaps we could have a barson.org chared calendar plug-in for Drupal?
My $.02 Weed
iCal
Mozilla Calendars / Sunbird, both publishing to remote calendar Edit Calendar properties to keep republishing changes.
Free publishing at http://www.icalx.com
Solution Found
Solution has been found!
Just in case anyone ever comes back to read this post in the future…
Outlook 2003 provides a function that allows a used to save their calendar as a web page as HTML. The HTML file can be upped to a server and accessed by anyone over the web. I believe Outlook 2003 also allows for a sharing of calendars on one computer, so that two users can showcase their calendars, separated by color scheme.
The HTML doesn’t provide a perfect solution, but it does allow for the ability to avoid scheduling conflicts.
True, but
In order to upload your claendar to a server, you need either a FTP server or a WEBDAV enabled webserver (or some sort of Server-side upload capability).
If you ans Shani connect to the mother computer regularly, it would work, but it couldn’t be updated while on the fly, right?
My $.02 Weed
Comes with home cable
We get 5MB of web space with our home broadband service, load it up there.
Better Solution found
Google has recently released a free web-based calendar service for consumers. You can schedule events and share agendas with others. It allows you to set up and control multiple calendars (personal, work, spouse). There is no advertising around the service today.
It seems the distinguishing mark between Google and Yahoo! is that Google Calendar allows you to restrict how much is shared with other viewers, while Yahoo! Calendar forces one to expose the entire calendar.
You have to register a gmail account to access the service.
Nice…
Now I just have to figure out how to synchronize that to a Palm Tungsten C (my wife’s Palm) and a Sprint PPC 6700, and I’m in business 🙂
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Doubt It, Taco
I think the realization of the all-mighty massive multiple-platform calendar tool is impeded by the laptop clock. Because the clock on your laptop (or stationary email server) doesn’t sync to different time zone while on the move, the ability to manage a calendar across many wireless and web tools gets hung up. Thus, I doubt you’ll be able to get perfect functionality with your handhelds. But good luck and please let me know what happens!
Google Calendar synching with Outlook
As of last week, Google announced a free utility release that you can download and use inside Outlook to sync with your Google Calendar. Basically, this is auto-syncing Outlook with the online calendar. For the past year, on a weekly basis, I’ve been exporting the calendar from Outlook in .csv and then importing to Google for private viewing by Wife Unit (see above re: life scheduling). That’s gotten old as several solutions have faltered. We’ve been messing around with the new utility at the office and it works without fail, both ways. Meaning, if you add/change/delete an event in Outlook it reflects after sync on the Google calendar, and vice versa.
The wireless phone frontier still hasn’t been broken, but this is great free solution for non-networked home or small office that needs to post schedules on the web.
Just started using!
I just started using Google Docs and Google Calendar. Awesomeness. I invited Unit:Wife:Barnson to start using it today, too, though I think she ignored the invite 🙂 I’m impressed so far, lots of functionality compared to the impaired calendar implemented by UltraMegacorp.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Two Years Later – Leading Solutions
Since the turn of 2007 Airset and Cozi have been getting lots of articles and mention about their emergence as online shared calendaring tools. I tried both. Airset and work and Cozi at home. Both are free.
Cozi may simply ‘just work’ when all you do is manually enter calendar events. However, everyone reading this blog is teched up to the point at which we need to be merging our resident software with the online calendar service. Cozi has an Outlook sync tool in beta, and once it crashed my machine twice I figured it was time to break out the ole’ uninstall.
At work, Airset is pretty amazing so far, but there’s definitely a learning curve involved. It’s for commercial use, syncing between work and mobile, shielded vs. open resource, etc. We had to try it a couple times before getting it right, but it’s powerful enough to warrant the time.
In reading back over the previous posts, maybe I should go back to Matt’s first solution, since Wife Unit and I are now both using Palm OS handhelds? Is there an update since then?
DateBk
DateBk has undergone several revisions and is even better than it was, but unfortunately I have to use a Windows Mobile device for work, and my beloved Palm Tungsten C has sat at home for the last year, unused. Anybody want a used Tungsten C cheap?
Christy also stopped using hers, citing poor battery life and the fact that it turns on when in her purse as it bumps other things, further reducing the battery life.
I have heard a LOT of great reports about Google Calendar. It really looks like gmail, google calendar, google groups, and their other miscellaneous services are poised for a leap into the enterprise. They offer upgrades to “pro” accounts with more storage for a reasonable fee, but their free services will probably be enough for me for a long time. Weak point seems to be Palm synchronization.
You can also share your Yahoo calendar and sync it to your Palm; Yahoo offers the sync software on their site. I’m not sure about collaboration options with them, though.
—
Matthew P. Barnson