Wednesday, October 17, 2007

From PLATO to OS X iCal 3.0 - an illustrated history of Calendaring and Personal Information Management

AppleInsider usually publishes Apple news and rumors with a bit of analysis, so I was bemused by today's Prince McLean article. He's written a brief illustrated history of the past 24 years of calendar-oriented personal information management, including screen shots from Agenda, Notes, MeetingMaker, Organizer and more.

This guy is serious about the PIM/calendar world. He may even be nuttier about this than I am now, though in my heyday I'd have gone a few rounds with him.

The article is full of insider tips, like this one ...

AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Leopard: iCal 3.0 [Page 3]

... Even home users that have no need for group calendaring will benefit from the new server-side improvements to iCal. That's because Apple didn't just build its iCal Server to fill out a feature check list. It has also begun using it company wide as its own corporate scheduling software in place of Meeting Maker. That means Apple employees are also now using the iCal client, and the result is that iCal itself has progressed rapidly...

Hey, we definitely need group calendaring in our home.  It's not just for Apple. Eventually we'll have five users (six if you count Kateva, but dogs don't care for calendars) on five machines with five calendars.

Now I'm thinking about buying a Mac Mini (Nano?) and running it headless with 10.5 server on it and a big external drive. I've looked over the 10.5 features, and I think Apple spec'd 10.5 from this blog (hey, it's theoretically possible) -- though I also think it will be very buggy for the next six months...

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