Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
Category: JavaScript
, Component, Calendar, MooTools
We just featured SCal, and now we have a MooTools Calendar component created by Aeron Glemann.
I have tried to make Calendar as semantic as possible–with proper usage of CAPTION, THEAD, TBODY, TH and TD elements–and lots of CSS styling hooks. View the Calendar stylesheet for examples of the CSS; see the Styling Your Calendar section in the Manual for references to the XHTML.
You create the beast via:
JAVASCRIPT:
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myCal1 = new Calendar({ date1: 'd/m/Y' }, { direction: 1 });
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myCal2 = new Calendar({ date2: 'd/m/Y' }, { classes: ['dashboard', ... ], direction: 1 });
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myCal3 = new Calendar({ date3: 'd/m/Y' }, { classes: ['i-heart-ny', ... ], direction: 1 });
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And you end up with some pretty stuff:
Monday, November 5th, 2007
Category: Calendar, MooTools
Roland Poulter recently released MooMonth, a MooTools-based calendar system. I did a brief email interview with Roland and here's his feedback:
When did you release it into alpha?
I put the site online a little more than a week ago. It was actually kinda slapped together, I designed a logo and stuff but I didn't want to commit to what I had. I just decided I wanted to make it available. A couple people on the MooTools Forum asked for the code, so I put the site up.
How far along is it?
I've been hacking at it for a while. At first I wasn't totally convinced I could do a calendar with all the cool effects in javascript. I started with a prototype to test if it would work. It wasn't until recently when I had some time off of work I was able to sit down for a week and totally rework everything. Progress has been much quicker since then. It been a few months of time, but I would say only a couple weeks of actual development. I hoping to get it ready for some production use in a few more weeks, but it depends how much of my free gets sucked up be the video games.
So far I have only been working on the views and transitions. I am nearly done with the "year view" which will zoom out of the current month and show all the months for a year. At this point I wish I hadn't started on it, it looks cool but I am not sure it will be useful. After I finish that I am going to work on event functionality.
What are the Big Features?
I want the calendar to be a complete javascript calendar ready to be plugged into an app.
I intend for it to be highly configurable, for style, for performance, and for layout.
Features I've got for developers:
- MooDate Date Extension (Fills in some gabs in the Javascript Date object.)
- *MooMonth Events (Handles a collection of events with Ajax.)
- *MooMonth Event (Create, Read, Update, Destroy events with Ajax.)
- MooMonth Date (Uses the date extension to setup a the calendars' date.)
- MooMonth Size (You can choose to present the calendar with a specified width and height, or tell it to mimic an html element, or just let it fill the window.)
- MooMonth Resize (Animate the size of the calendar.)
- MooMonth Element (Choose to use a table structure or a div hierarchy, only the div. The table type is limited, its really only meant for "mini months". Options are available for setting border size, label size, header size, and margin. Also it uses events for all the controls so you can change what happens when you click on a day.)
- MooMonth Constructors (Make an calendar app, *date-picker, or customize your own.)
Features for users:
- Multiple views: Day, Week, Month, *Year
- View Transitions
- *View specific controls (Clicking next when viewing a week will take you to next week.)
- *Events
- *Dragable
- *Resizable
* Planned features, but not finished.
The code for MooMonth is released under a mixed Creative Commons/LGPL license and takes advantage of the MooTools JavaScript library. You can play with the calendar via the demo page.
Also, Roland is looking for help on this project so if you're interested be sure to contact him via the site.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Category: Showcase, Google, Calendar, Email, Business, Office
From the You-Know-When-Ajax-Has-Gone-Mainstream-Dept, Google announced today it will be offering businesses a premium service for its key productivity applications, at $50/user/year. The package includes:
- Access to office-style applications - Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator. No presentation package yet - perhaps Google should acquire S5 :-).
- Access to communication applications - GMail (@your-own-domain), Google Calendar, Google Talk (voice/IM).
- Access to Google Homepage (maybe corporations could deck this out to become their intranet homepage?)
- Control panel to manage the domain
- Ads can be turned off
- Storage at 10GB/user
- Integration with organisation's sign-on and email infrastructure
- Phone support
The apps themselves are available to anyone, but the integration and extra services come with the premium service. Google provides this comparison table.
The giant elephant in this room is your company's data sitting on Google's servers. In the absence of an "Apps Appliance" sitting inside the firewall, there will always be a major proportion of the market unwilling to commit to a solution like this - increased risk of data loss, theft, and manipulation. Google's pure-external model keeps things nice and simple, but it's not for everyone.
Zoho, for example, offers "in-premise edition" to run inside an organization's network. Similarly, Zimbra's collaboration app. It's also becoming possible to make your own stack, with apps like Wikicalc and the various wikis, though nothing as comprehensive as Google's offering. It's feasible MS will move their apps in that direction too.
The comparison among these approaches will be worth watching in coming months. For now, though, it's great to see how much Ajax and the web has evolved in the past two years, with Google providing a lot of the inspiration. From TechCrunch: "Beyond competition and concerns, tonight is a good time to recognize the incredible force of innovation that Google is as well. Its nearly full-service suite of sophisticated, integrated online services is something of historic proportion."
Thursday, January 4th, 2007
Category: Showcase, Calendar
30 boxes has always given you the ability to show your public events from a calendar, but it was a primitive list.
Now, a rich calendar view is shown so any scary person on the internet can stalk you via a nice experience.
Monday, January 1st, 2007
Category: JavaScript, Library, Component, Google, Calendar
Christian Decker wanted to access Google Calendar's new JSON services in a simple way, so he has created, and shared GCalendar, an API for doing just that.
JAVASCRIPT:
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var cal = new Calendar(“7cghno42lleqpbihmoi5qiikm8%40group.calendar.google.com”);
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cal.onsuccess = function(c){ alert(c); }
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cal.loadFeed();
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Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
Category: Showcase, Calendar
The Remember the Milk folks have added task management to Google Calendar (something many wish Google had added themselves).
We know that many of you are managing your tasks with Remember The Milk and your events with Google Calendar, and we thought it would be very cool if we could bring the two together. This new feature adds a small task icon to the top of each day in Google Calendar -- click on the icon to:
- Review your tasks for the day
- Add new tasks and edit existing ones
- Easily complete and postpone tasks
- Review your overdue tasks
- Optionally show tasks with no due date
- See where your tasks are located on a map (Google Maps integration)
This is really interesting. An outside group was able to add an important feature that we can not all use in a Google app itself.
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006
Category: Showcase, Calendar
YCombinator's Kiko team has released a new version that completely revamps the look and feel of the September 2005 beta. Kiko still has the same drag and drop functionality that it had in its beta but now it sports a brand new, and much cleaner, interface and a whole host of new features:
- Appointment reminders via email, text messages, and AIM
- RSS feed for upcoming events
- Natural Language Quick Create (ex: "3/26 2am Raid on Ironforge [WoW] +thrall +gromhellscream")
- Import appointments and contacts via iCal and vCard
- and personal public URLs for your calendar.
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
Category: Calendar
We are at the Under the Radar conference on Microsoft's campus in Mountain View.
The conference is all about the new web, and companies get to show off their tech. Then, the evil folks in the audience get to vote and take a poll on the companies, while a panel pings them with questions.
We are surrounded by much cooler cats than us like Dave Winer, Steve Gilmor, Michael Arrington, Dion Hinchcliffe, and the list goes on.
We will do a few posts on what we are seeing in the show to keep you up to date.
When 2.0
The first session contains calendar people such as:
CalendarHub
Scott Mace, co-founder of CalendarHub starts off the session.
The demo started off focusing on the privacy side of calendaring, and how each event can have a custom visibility.
The world of mashup was shown with the integration of Google Maps.
New: They are finishing up an Outlook plugin, so we can have offline support via this synchronizing.
Ben asked: "What makes your product unique?"
- First: interface (subscription)
- Second: integration (more than ics files)
Michael Arrington is known for being pretty honest, and he doesn't hold punches here. He is "bearish" on the the business model of online calendars, and thinks that CalendarHub needs more Ajax features to get more of a "wow" factor.
Mosuki
"Spend my time with your friends".
Got started as a side thing for fun. They started with the mathematics of social networks. This is a tool from the world of the PhD's rather than from someone who just wants to build a calendar.
They did a great job at trying to define the calendar space, and of course end up with the most check marks ;)
They focus on invitation, sharing, calendar, network, word of mouth, privacy, discussion. More than just a calendar is what they are trying to say.
Business model? Targeted ads (of course), premium memberships, event promotion, ticket sales.
They do work for you. They let you type english. "from wed to fri", "nighttime oct 8th". They seem to be trying to do the hard stuff themselves, to make our lives easier.
Skobee
Founders are from Plumtree, then BEA, and now Skobee.
This app is all about using a first degree social network to filter what's cool. It's more than just a calendar, and has a lot of community features (such as comments all over).
They showed off email integration via cc'ing plans@skobee.com. Put in some magic such as "when: 3/6/06" in the email, and it groks that out. Put in "where: ..." and you get a Google Map mashup.
Zvents
Everyone is keen to say "we aren't about calendar!", and this was no exception. Zvents comes out firing about how hard it is to "do events right".
Conclusion
Haven't noticed the cool Ajax features that other calendar-esque apps have.
Thursday, February 9th, 2006
Category: Ajax, Calendar
On his blog, Joel Spolsky, has posted some of his opinions on the proliferation of Ajax-enabled calendering systems that have been coming out lately - and how none of them seem to be up to the mark.
For all the Ajax calendars that are appearing, it's a shame I can't find one which really meets my needs.
I tried out Trumba, Kiko, 30 Boxes, Yahoo! Calendar, and Spongecell. I couldn't recommend any of them.
My needs are probably weird, but not that weird.
Further on in the post he mentions the simple needs he's looking for but hasn't found yet - things like: "enter flights", "understand timezones", and "print out something reasonable". He also touches on the "ship early and often" mantra that so many largely anticipated sites seem to be following, without talking the time to fully develop a product that everyone won't think is "lame" when they look and see it unfinished.
He wraps it up with his theory as to why there are so many of these Ajax calendars popping up lately. According to him, it boils down to the creation of hype to try to garner corporate interest to, hopefully, get snatched up as the "Next Big Thing".
Monday, January 30th, 2006
Category: Ruby, Showcase, Calendar
Spongecell is the latest in the long line of Ajax calendars. Its built on Ruby on Rails and uses the scriptaculous goodies, but the coolest feature is the "spongebar". It takes a natural English pharse and figures out what appoitment to add to your calendar. So you can type in "meet over $5 flavored coffee at Starbucks 4 pm tomorrow" and it figures things out and adds the appropriate appointments.
The interface seemed nice and responsive and fairly clean. Drag and drop seemed to be well used, though I wasn't sure about some of the effects.
Other featuers include:
- easy mobile interface
- iCalendar import/export and RSS feeds
- simple, intuitive UI
Btw, there is a launch party in San Francisco on Wednesday if you are in the area.
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
Category: Showcase, Calendar
Certain apps tend to jump out for Ajaxian writers. The online calendar is one of them, and Kiko has stepped up to the plate with their offering.
What's better?
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Interface
- Click On Anything - Everything is interactive. Right click it, drag it - it all works the way you expect from a native application.
- Everything's On One Page - Manage your groups, view your calendar, and create and tag your appointments all from one page.
- Be Soothed By Kiko's Pleasant Colors - Pastels are good for the soul.
What's coming (real soon)?
- API
- A powerful and flexible servlet API that allows third party developers to produce tools which enhance the value of your Kiko Calendar.
- Everything Kiko Calendar can do, your web service can do too. Mash-up to your hearts content.
Stuff we're also working on
- Accessibility - SMS, Instant Messenger, PDA, offline and pure HTML versions
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Import and Export: iCal, whatever Outlook uses
- Buzzwords Compliance: AJAX, Web 2.0, Tagging, RSS
( via Chris Beams )
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
Category: Screencast, Showcase, Calendar
Maarten Stolte pointed me to a flash demo of a new ajaxian calendar: Hula.
Hula is getting a new web interface, and it kicks ass, as this (flash) demo shows
Can't wait to check out the javascript and CSS that powers all that AJAX interaction and css fades. Pay attention to the sides of the calendar, where it kinda disapears using probably a layer with a transparent gif or png.
Update: Marten commented that they have already released an even cooler updated movie.
Update 2: the code is now available!
