Comments on: Maemo5 Calendar — is it cruel joke?

By: Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:50:03 +0000

Having just moved to the n900 from a Nokia 6500 it is sad to see such a major regression from Nokia devices that have had the aforementioned basic features for well over a decade (things like 3rd Thursday of every Month). As the calendar backend is based on e-d-s and Moblin shipped ‘dates’ which is open source it might be worth investigating whether the functionality is contained in that, or easily added to that moving forward and then package it up for maemo.

By: Marcin Juszkiewicz

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:00:22 +0000

When nokia will open sources of calendar I will start checking how to improve it and will send patches (if will use N900 at that time).

By: temro

temro — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:46:50 +0000

stop whining, write patches

By: jukey

jukey — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:26:57 +0000

I'm using Exchange 2003 which also is supported since PR 1.1.

Regarding sync: I also use my N900 more as an read only device for business calendar entries. So our use cases are different. It seems to be a long way for nokia to a full featured calendar and I can't understand that they don't want to get input (patches, enhancements) from the community. Now they have brainstorm output but no ressoures to implement these features to fremantle.

For my private calendar (synchronized via syncml) the featureset is good enough for 90% of my daily needs. All I miss sometimes is attendee support.

By: Woody

Woody — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:24:34 +0000

Your use case is not typical. Most people who use a calendar app on a phone want it to sync with a full fledged calendar system (like Outlook or Google). I would love to be able to alter the alarm on-phone to be 1:15, but since I can do that 3 other places (including on Google from the phone's browser) and then sync that down, I'm ok with it working in the limited way it does now.

I also think it's disingenuous to say the calendar app is "closed" and nobody can re-write it. The API for accessing calendar entries is quite open. Writing your own app that reads and injects data into the existing database is quite doable (there are several sync apps that do just that). If the demand was so high for these improved features, you'd have seen a re-write by now. Instead you see the more common use-case of sync clients showing up to sync with calendar services not supported by the existing software.

It's easy to say (rightfully so) that Nokia should have done better for their flagship phone. But the be beauty of an opensource platform is that if you don't like something, you have a clear way to fix it yourself. Instead of writing a blog bitching about it and replying to every response, you could be writing a new app to do all the stuff you want it to to replace the calendar app with.

By: Jon Pritchard

Jon Pritchard — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 21:00:12 +0000

Not having used the N900's calendar, as I've already said, it sounds a lot like there's been absolutely no advancement from the S60 calendar (which I see as good but nowhere near as comprehensive as I would like).

Not open sourcing the front-end calendar is curious... what's the harm in it? I'm pleased that it at least appears as though the N900 will be getting firmware fixes quite regularly, some of which I presume are community fixed bugs. But how are you meant to fix bugs in calendar, or add features to it when it's closed?!

SyncML is supposed to be the standard for syncing these kinds of things but yet support for it is still a patchwork in itself among clients.

I synchronise using SyncML over Bluetooth, with Opensync and Mozilla Sunbird. It's not perfect, because of a disparity of features between clients, and I guess a lack of support in the protocol too.

By: Marcin Juszkiewicz

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:37:32 +0000

lee: all depends on what kind of use you have and from which platform you migrate.

By: Marcin Juszkiewicz

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:20:00 +0000

I doubt that Harmattan will get better applications then Fremantle got.

Urho Kontorri (Project Manager of Fremantle Applications Framework) told some time ago that calendar team which wrote maemo5 version was moved to work on harmattan version. So do not expect anything better ;(

By: Marcin Juszkiewicz

Marcin Juszkiewicz — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:17:03 +0000

Sure, you are using N900 calendar as read only so it is fine. I always used my mobile devices as standalone ones without relying on syncing them with desktop or other services.

By: lee

lee — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:16:59 +0000

what are all these features that people seem to need, but almost no one ever uses