[NTLK] My feelings about iCal..

From: Jim Witte (jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us)
Date: Wed Sep 11 2002 - 00:08:20 PDT


   I just now installed iCal and started it up. I'm not particularly
impressed, but them I'm spoiled on Dates.. I've got a 400MHz iMac DV+,
but I wasn't particularly struck by the slowness - of course, I only
had a couple of meetings. There was a slight lag in the dragging, but
nothing beyond the realtime-updating of anything else, so I assume
that's just the efficiency of the blitting algorithm in Quartz.

   Now on to the critique, in no particular order of gripes.. On a
purely visual note, when events from different calendars overlap, I'd
have expected to see some kind of color blending come into play..
Given all the iCandy (TM 2002 Me unless otherwise claimed!) that's in
the other iApps.. I'm annoyed now I can't just click on a meeting an
immediately start typing into the subject field.. The Event Info
inspector is a bit out of the way - it should remember it's screen
position at the very least, an even better idea would be to have a
slip-type box that would pop up like in the Jaguar address book when
you edit particular fields. I miss being able to display less than a
week at a time like in Dates.

   Hmm, why can't I scroll the time view beyond 8AM-8PM? This could be
rather problematic for college students ;-) - not to mention shift
workers.. In the Meeting Info, I'd *really* like a Newton-style date
selector like clMonthView instead of the clumsy-to-use holdover from
the original Alarm Clock (! How old). A large interface oddity (I'm
not sure I'd raise it to the level of an inconsistency) is that if I
have an event in my Home calendar, switch to the Work calendar, then
try to drag out a new event in the same timeframe as the original
event, it doesn't create a new event in the Work calendar, but switches
back and moves the original event. The is made more confusing because
events in non-selected calendars go "dimmed", making one think they are
unmodifiable.

   Gee, I wonder if someone at Apple would roll their eyes if I sent in
this critique (cleaned up a bit), and specifically compared iCal to
Newton Dates? Especially since iCal does seem to be very much based on
Dates interface wise (but then, all calendars are pretty much the same,
except for S.J.'s tagline, "we live in multiple calendars"..)

Jim

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