A Quick Peek At Invy: A Calendar Coordination App

Coordinating times for meetings or calls is one of the most persistent headaches, and one that wastes time and energy. The best strategy is the following:

1. An organizer picks a bunch of possible times — presumably times when she is available — and sends those to others she wants to attend
2. Each of the invitees indicate which times they can make (perhaps penciling in the options to avoid later conflicts)
3. The organizer picks a time that all — or as many as possible — can attend, and sends out the chosen time to the invitees
4. The invitees and organizer put the appointment on their calendars (deleting the penciled in appointments).

This is theory, but in practice all sorts of wrinkles come up, and even in the best case the organizer is left leafing through a chain of emails trying to figure out who can make what times.

Invy is a sleek looking and easy to use iPhone app that is designed a mobile-first solution to this problem, or at least most of it. (Note that there have been a long series of other solutions, like Outlook, but leave that to one side).

The organizer has to use the Invy app, but the others do not: they can be contacted via email that links to the Invy website, where they can do their part of the dance.

Here’s the landing page on the iPhone:

I’ve created a Invy with two possible times to another of my email addresses to test, one not registered with Invy. I acted as both sides of the negotiation, turning down one time and selecting the other, and tried the chat: discussion is essential in these cases if you want to avoid email. At the end, on the iPhone side as the organizer, I picked the final time.

Here’s the web UI:

Invy added the event to the calendar on my phone automatically, after I — as organizer — selected the time/date for the meeting. I also received another email as the invitee with an .ics calendar file as an attachment, so invitees without Invy could import that to their calendars.

It all worked perfectly, aside from some minor UI issues. For example, when presented with just a single option for a meeting, it wasn’t clear how to say no. Turns out you have to agree to the time/date by clicking on a checkmark, and then unchecking it. Otherwise, smooth.

I would like to see a slight enlarging of the use case, if only for those with Invy installed. If I have proposed a variety of dates for a pending Invy I’ve organized, or if I have said that some time/dates are possible in an Invy I have received from another user, I’d like those to appear on my calendar as being ‘penciled in’. I use the convention of putting a question mark at the end of the event’s title, like ‘Dinner with Carlos?’, as a way to indicate penciled appointments. This would help me avoid booking something in one of those penciled spots while the Invy negotiations were still in process.

Also, there is no way as yet to indicate any preference across various time/dates, which is very common in coordinating meetings. Yes, a lot of that could be embedded in the chat, but a simple way to click on ‘better, good, worse’ on each might be helpful.

At any rate, leaving that elaboration aside, Invy is great, and I will be using it immediately. I am involved in a series of interviews for a project, where I am trying to schedule times with a long and growing list of brainiacs in the social business field, all of whom are just as busy as I am. This will help me immensely, although it’s a use case where the penciling feature would be extremely helpful, so I can avoid double bookings.

4 May 2012 5 Permalink

Alarms: A Deceptively Simple Calendar Tool

I saw a mention about Alarms, a new Mac OS X take on calendars.

The UX is based on a bell-shaped toolbar icon, which opens a top-of-screen calendar when clicked, pushing down and graying out other running apps:

click to enlarge

The app presents a left to right scrolling arrangement of hours. You can click anywhere and create an event, and at the time that the time for that event reaches ‘Now’ (as time passes the hours move to the left), an alarm goes off. This includes a blinking display of the alarm icon, and various tones can be selected too.Note that selecting a date on the calendar to the right allows other days to be displayed, and then the same calendar UI is presented but for that date.

An alarm can be created by dragging a URL to the icon, which opens the calendar display. You can then drop the URL on the time that you’d like to do something, like responding to an email (after grabbing the email URL), or writing a post (after drag-and-dropping the piece’s URL). I’ve even grabbed images and dragged them to the tool.

When the alarm goes off, the display pops a small display, and the URL can be accessed, or the alarm checked.

There is a keystroke setting to snooze tasks, and one for opening/closing the alarms calendar.

There is a deceptively important integration with iCal:

1. Since iCal tasks may be shared, it is possible to use that mechanism to share alarms, so long as both (all) users have Alarms installed. But there is no way to only sync some alarms, so all must be shared.
2. iCal serves as an archive for alarms when synced, while in Alarms, checked off tasks disappear. This alone justifies taking the five minutes to set up syncing. Unchecking tasks in the synced iCal calendar makes them current again in Alarms, too.
3. URL tasks can have their text fields edited in iCal, which can’t be done in Alarms.

Thoughts

My calendaring is all over the place right now. I use Google Calendar for scheduled events, like calls and meetings, and until recently I used Remember The Milk to track larger scale activities, but that app’s biggest benefit is integration with Gmail and it breaks every time Google updates the tool. That makes it pathologically annoying.

I have been experimenting with CRM capabilities of some of the products reviewed in the Streams In Business research project (which I am finishing up this week, I swear!). But the jury is out on that larger scale coordination.

On the finer grained, moment-to-moment task management, Alarms is appealing. It’s faster than writing a note to yourself, and much faster than creating an event in iCal. It’s conceivable that it might even take over the more traditional schedule-a-telcon sort of task, but I think to edge into that region it would have to integrate email invitations, and a number of other features. If the developers behind Alarms could do that, and still keep it small and simple, it would be a real winner.

related articles

• Mac Gems: Alarms 1.0.1 (macworld.com)
• Introducing Alarms, a freakishly awesome reminder app (smokingapples.com)

18 October 2010 1 Permalink

Billy Pilgrim Has Come Unstuck In Email

I had been using Google’s Gmail for years until quite recently. Among other things, it offered high speed access to a large store of email, until earlier this year when it seemed to start slowing down. And, as I had transitioned to iPhone, it seemed increasingly unintegrated with how I was living.

A few weeks ago, after downloading the iPhone 4 OS for my old iPhone 3Gs, I noticed that Apple had announced a beta of a new version of their MobileMe Calendar:

It looked so good that I had to take a closer look at the entire MobileMe suite of tools. I signed up for a MobileMe account (which is not cheap: $86/year), and hooked things up, and tried to walk away from Gmail and Google Calendar for awhile. The results are interesting.

First, I started using the MobileMe apps via browser, but these sync with Apple’s desktop apps, like Mail and Calendar, as well as the apps on my iPhone (now my new iPhone 4). U haven’t been traveling since this experiment started, so my experience has been principally around the desktop and browser.

MobileMe Mail. I tweaked things so that my Gmail account is being pulled into MobileMe Mail. I like the interface and user experience, especially because of the endless ‘loading’ I seem to be experiencing on Gmail, but even without that it is cleaner and easier to read:

It’s not just the lack of ads in the emails, either. Gmail’s UI is kind of ugly by comparison.

MobileMe mail lacks the integration with Google services that Gmail touts, but I didn’t use many, except for the erratically implemented tasks and calendar integration. So moving over I simply decided to start with the minimum and see what was possible.

Relatively quickly, I noticed that my Gmail Notifier — a tiny app that runs in the background on my Mac — was no longer helpful. It still sent Growl alerts, but they were attached to Gmail, not to MobileMe. I found Vibealicious’ Notify as a replacement, and that has dramatically skewed my experience of MobileMe.

Basically, Notify is a lightweight but nearly complete email client on its own. It is extremely well integrated with MobileMe Mail, so much so that I can read and file mail into MobileMe folders, and even reply to, create, and send messages.

This has led me to become unstuck in email. (Extra points for the literary reference alluded to in the title: anyone?)

In the past, I would open my gmail, and my calendar, and keep them basically open all day.

Now, I do the opposite. I open Notify because of seeing an alert, or noting that I have a certain number of unread emails, and I glance through them, filing some, deleting others, and occasionally sending a brief response. For more in depth emails, I will click through which brings up MobileMe in a browser window. After finishing that email, though, I close the window. And email doesn’t seem to dominate the landscape on my screen like it used to.

MobileMe Calendar.  It’s pretty clear that the Calendar beta is what I want: calendar sharing, invitations, etc.

The current Calendar (I don’t have access to the beta yet) doesn’t allow me to import external calendars, like my travel schedule from TripIt, so I have actually been using the desktop Mac Calendar and the Calendar app on my iPhone. I find that I am leaving my iPhone Calendar open — it does show all subscribed calendar feeds, like the desktop Calendar.

This also includes a simple task list, which I have adopted. But I think I will reserve my judgment about calendaring. Those who have played with the beta say that tasks will be supported in the browser version, and sychronized with the desktop Calendar, but not available on iPad or iPhone. I bet they will rethink that in subsequent releases, but not a real factor for me at present since I don’t have an iPad and I schlep my 13” laptop around nearly everywhere.

Tentative Conclusions

I am still sending email from my Gmail account, and using it as a store — I have to go back for old threads and email addresses — but I can envision slowly transitioning to MobileMe permantently, so long as the beta turns out as advertised.

The biggest change has really been the sense of becoming unstuck, of treating email more like text messaging, and less like email. Partly that is because of the lightweight UX of MobileMe Mail, and partly the use of Notify. And I like that feeling a lot.

(Again — Extra points for the literary reference alluded to in the title: anyone?)

14 July 2010 1 Permalink

/Message: Pairup

Pairup is a social networking service for business travelers that I really would like to have take off (pun intended). I have always wanted to use a “ships passing in the night” service, where I could simply state my travel plans, and I would discover that an old friend was going to be in New York City the same dates as me.

There is more to Pairup than finding old friends: the service is geared to helping business travelers meet new people as well, such as people attending the same event you are traveling to, or locals with similar interests. I wonder if by trying to do so much, however, the designers have moved too far away from a simple premise, and move into conflict with larger professional social networks? On the other hand, I could make the argument that my “ships in the night” service is really just a feature than a solution like Upcoming.org or Google Calendar could offer.

2 May 2007 Permalink

Garett Rogers on Google Calendar Task

Garrett Rogers has spent some time productively poking at the javascript in Google Calendar, and surmises that completeable tasks are soon to be rolled out:

[from Google Calendar task list feature | Googling Google | ZDNet.com]

I found some code that suggests they will be adding completable events — or “tasks”.  This would be nice because the only thing that even resembles a task is an all day event — and you can’t mark them as completed or carry them forward.

od.prototype.completable = function(a,b){ alert(“UNIMPLEMENTED completable”) };od.prototype.completions = function(a,b){ alert(“UNIMPLEMENTED completions”) };od.prototype.oncomplete = function(a,b,c,d){ }   (see how the function for “oncomplete” does nothing?)

Google really does listen to their users — a task list is a heavily requested feature of people using this service in the Google Calendar Help group.

23 April 2006 1 Permalink

Google Calender - Sharable and Easy to Use

Got the tip off that Google had finally released the beta of it’s long-awaited Calendar fromCNET News.com’s Elinor Mills.

I took a look, and it seems a fully functional but fairly austere and clean design, and incorporates nearly everything I would want in an online calendar: multiple calendars, import and export of calendars, iCal support, alerts/notifications (including to cell phone), public/private calendar events, invitation system that is well integrated to Gmail.

There’s talk of future integration with Upcoming.org, so that publicizing events will be easy.

But a few big things I was hoping to see are not there:

1. Gmail style labels, or tags — I wanted to be able to label events in the calendar with the same sort of tags that Gmail supports, and, even better, I was hoping for an integrated view of events, chats, and events based on those tags. Would be killer!
2. RSS feeds from the calendars — there is mention of XML associated with calendars, so maybe that’s code for RSS, but there is nothing about it in the help docs. More to follow.
3. Mobile access looks to be limited to SMS notifications. I really want direct access to the calendar through my mobile web access, like the equivalent Gmail service.
4. Gtalk presence — why not? If I am looking at an upcoming event, why not have the same Gtalk buddylist pawn for invitees that supports emailing or chatting with them?

And of course, they would release this the week that I am using my son’s Ibook. I don’t have access to my real iCal, and I can’t import my calendar in and fool with it. A First Look will have to wait until the weekend.

13 April 2006 Permalink

30 Boxes beta on February 5th

I am joining in the chorus of praise for 30 Boxes (along with Scoble, Thomas Hawk (who calls it the best calendar ever), Matt Mullenweg, and Om, who called 30 boxes the gmail of calendars) even though I have only fooled with it for a few hours. I posted about it a few days ago, but just based on others’ thoughts. But now I have gotten access to the beta (thanks Narendra!)

In the past few months I have fiddled with a long list of online calendar tools — Plaxo, Planzo, Kiko, Airset, and Trumba — but I haven’t connected with any of them. Mostly because I am looking for a calendar tool to pull together the various unconnected elements of a digital life, not to simply replace a Filofax.

30 Boxes is at an incomplete stage, but what there is is dead-on. Especially the social element.

In this screenshot (click to expand), I have clicked on a particular day, and all the timestamped elements of my digital world are pulled in: blog posts, Flickr photos, and I had hoped to see recent music played from Last.fm, but I had some sort of RSS snafu. (Along the way I discovered that my favorite geoloco app, Plazes.com, does not provide an RSS feed for my peregrinations, which is dumb.)

But also notice the stuff that my new buddy, Thomas Hawk, has incorporated into his calendar which I am including into mine. This is where it gets interesting.

30Boxes allows users to tag events, which would perhaps be cool all on its own. However, when you are setting up the sharing filters for friends getting access to you calendar, you can restrict access to those events tagged with specific terms. For the members of a project team, you can grant access only to events with the project name tag, for example. Or you can show your karate events to other karateka from your dojo. Or family events to family.

There’s a long shopping list of missing things — scheduling meetings, iCal subscribe and publish, RSS feeds, inward filters (I might want to only see certain things from Thomas’ calendar, even if he is giving me everything), javascript (for embedding calendars into blogs and other websites), search, and groups (all members of a team could be managed at once) — but what is there is good.

And of course, I still want the Nerdvana buddylist view: where the various posts, pictures, and events associated with my friends are displayed as attributes hanging off an instant messaging style buddylist, and my attributes and presence info are displayed to them in their buddylists. But I bet I will have to wait for Yahoo, Google, MSN, or AOL to provide that for me.

4 February 2006 1 Permalink