Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Wednesday, September 11, 2002
16:30 - iCal http://www.apple.com/ical/	(top)
There was a time, like about two years ago, when word was that Apple's market researchers had determined that the "i" moniker branding had reached saturation among consumers and was now on the way down in people's estimation. People were evidently sick of seeing "i"-everything. iTunes was the last thing Apple had released with such a naming scheme, and many people figured that that was the last that we'd see: we expected Apple to start phasing out the "i" names like they've been phasing out the "Think Different" slogan, and replace it with some new Next Big Thing. Well, now it's two years later, and it seems that if anything the iBranding has only grown thicker. We now have an entire suite of iApps, to say nothing of the iPod, and little not-quite-iApp-but-interesting-nonetheless tools like iChat. The iMac is still with us. Only iTools has bit the big one, and it looks like a casualty of restructuring rather than a concerted push to eradicate the iNames. So now we've got iCal. It's pretty slick, I must say. I'm used to Meeting Maker, in which you can't do things like drag events from one location in the week to another, and in which the horrible fugly MDI interface on Windows actively impedes my ability to get anything done. But at least it's networked, and iCal isn't. Well, not entirely, anyway. See, iCal does have some very neato networking stuff: you can "subscribe" to various calendars, including those published by your friends via .Mac, and it will keep in sync with all of those as your friends update them. When you create a meeting and invite people, it sends out e-mail notifications via Mail, which contain attachment files which are subscription scripts that you click on-- and it inputs the meeting into your attendees' iCals. Pretty slick, I think (it uses AppleScript to send the notifications in the background). And Apple has a page full of interesting-to-the-public calendars that you can subscribe to, with things like movie/DVD release dates, US holidays (hey, you never know when those might change), music tours, SAT/ACT schedules, and so on. You can also web-publish your calendars, so people without iCal can view them. It's all done via WebDAV, so it's not dependent upon .Mac (provided you can set up WebDAV properly). You can also import and export calendars in the standard "ical" and "vcal" formats. Not bad, not bad indeed. But it's not really going to reach its full potential until it can do things like sync to your Palm or your iPod (which will come later this month when the beta of iSync is released, which can also sync to cellphones so your meeting reminder alarms can go off in movie theaters), and with Exchange servers. If iCal worked with Exchange, there would be a lot of happy Mac users here in the company who could do all their calendaring in an app that works really well, instead of having to use Outlook and constantly wipe off the thick layer of virus slime that it leaves upon one's skin. It's a nice little app. Nothing ground-breaking or earth-shattering, but with very clever use of what resources Apple can bring to the table (not just OS X transparency and stuff, but centralized publishing, hosting, and interconnectivity). Who knows what the strategy looks like that this is a part of? Because surely nobody within Apple considered iCal to be a killer app that would drive Switchers. It's not that kind of thing, and it was clearly never intended to be. But now that Phillips has begun incorporating OS X-based Rendezvous into home entertainment devices, and the big three printer makers are already on board, this could be part of a push by Apple to make big, powerful friends in the industry. And that, more than anything else, is what will keep Apple buoyant against the Redmond Tide. Oh, and this Jobs quote was interesting: "We're not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It's turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your e-mail? We have all the technology ourselves to do that - we just don't know whether it will be successful." In other words, "Yeah, we know handwriting recognition is useless. But it's all there in OS X anyway, and it's really good. Just so the technology isn't dead, in case it becomes useful later. We just want to give people those kinds of options and that kind of power, if they choose to use it."