iCal: A Mini-Review
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Apple released iCal today, an “elegant personal calendar application that helps you manage your life and your time better than ever before.” Well, it’s certainly a personal calendar application, but I don’t know about the other parts of that sentence. Here are a few quick, dirty, and probably unfair impressions gleaned from playing around with it for the last half hour.
The image above is of the main calendar window set to month view. The various elements are:
- Calendar list On start you’ll see two default calendars, “Home” and “Work.” You can rename or delete these. Additional calendars you create appear in this list.
- Calendar view Set to month in this shot. It also displays a day or week view. One problem is that the main interface window resizes according to which view you choose rather than expanding the view to fit your set window size. You may find this as irritating as I do.
- To do list Pretty straightforward. You can show or hide this as you like, although there’s no keyboard command to toggle it easily (more on the curious lack of keyboard commands later).
- ‘Timeline’ A list of mini-calendars stretching into the past and future. There’s no scrollbar in this pane so you can’t position the cursor over it and use your scrollwheel to zip forward or back through time, which would have been nice. Instead you have to use the up and down arrows located at the top of the pane.
- Search results pane You can toggle the visibility of this. It appears automatically when you enter text into the search field.
- Calendar view selection Choose between day, week or month view and use the arrows to step backwards or forwards through time
- Search field Works as it does in Mail.app; you don’t need to hit Return to initiate a search. The results pane updates as you type.
In addition to these main elements, you can see six other buttons along the bottom of the screen (two on the left, four on the right). The first button on the left-hand side creates a new calendar (Cmd-Opt-N), while its neighbour toggles the visibility of the timeline. The remaining buttons are, from left to right:
- Show info (Cmd-I) Brings up the information window which works like the properties inspector from Macromedia apps on individual items or calendars themselves (I’ve included a shot on the next page).
- Toggle results pane Showing the results pane without entering anything in the search field seems to list all entries in all calendars. Entering text winnows this list down to match your search string.
- People window Behold the power of the new Address Book! This button accesses the system-wide contact database introduced in the new version of the Address Book app.
- Toggle To do list Show or hide the right-hand To Do List panel
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This is very much a 1.0 release: feature-rich it ain’t. The big deal with iCal appears to be the ability to publish calendars via .Mac accounts or WebDAV-enabled servers, but I haven’t tried this yet. This is going to be a big whoop for a lot of people, but iCal will nonetheless have to prove itself as a worthy standalone calendering application (like Now Up-to-date, which also allows publishing and subscribing over local networks, or Microsoft Entourage) regardless of how powerful its publishing capabilities turn out to be. If Apple can’t get iCal up to speed quickly and convincingly, it won’t really matter if it can drive your kids to their soccer game because no one will want to use it in the first place.
Preferences
The minimalism of the Preferences window provides a telling glimpse of the pressure the programmers must have been under to get this thing out the door. there are very few preferences to speak of:
You can specify whether weeks have 5 or 7 days and on what day they should begin. The “Day” section sets some options for day views and the final section offers a modicum of event management ability. You cannot change fonts or colours (except for calendars and their events, and then you only have a choice of six; you do this in the Info window) which is irritiating because the default highlight colour for the current day is very hard to see on an LCD screen (at least on my trusty old Pismo).
Menus and Key Commands
One aspect of iCal which I hope is a result of the rush to get it released rather than a harbinger of future interface wonkiness is the discrepancy between what you can do with the mouse compared to what you can do from the menus, and the lack of the traditional ‘key command bridge’ between the two. One of the bedrock principles of Macintosh software is that there are generally keyboard equivalents for menu items and even most interface elements. The obvious example is in a Save dialogue box, where the default choice (“Save”) is highlighted, meaning that you can simply hit Return to choose this option (you can’t help but notice this in Aqua’s pulsing candy buttons).
With iCal, many of the interface elements don’t have equivalents in the menus, which means they don’t have associated key commands. What this means is a lot more mousing than you may like, especially if you prefer to keep your hands on the keyboard as much as possible. For example, the first button at the bottom of the screen is “New Calendar” and it has an equivalent command under the File menu (with an associated key command: Cmd-Opt-N). So far so good. The next button, Hide/Show Timeline, has no equivalent in any of the menus (in fact, there’s no View menu which is where you’d expect to find it) and consequently no key command. Toggling calendar views between day, week and month cannot be done from a menu (so likewise no key command for this) nor can you place focus in the search field (the Tab key would be the natural choice for this except the Tab key does nothing anywhere in the program!) - you have to mouse to it and click on it before you can begin typing.
The list goes on. In fact, of all the buttons on the main screen only 3 of them have key commands: New Calendar, Get Info (Cmd-I), and Go To Today (Cmd-T). Everything else requires mousing.
To do, or not to do…
The To Do List seems like an afterthought. If it’s not visible, you need to click the button in the lower right of the screen to show it. Choosing “New To Do” (Cmd-K) from the File menu will make it visible if it’s hidden (but you have to close it manually: no problem since you’ll probably want it visible all the time anyway) and create an untitled item in the list. To Do items are associated with the calendar that you have selected when you create a new item (so if your Work calendar’s colour is green, the new To Do item will appear in green text). But the logic stops there.
To Do items are not associated with a particular day. You can go into day view, change to a different day of a different month of a different year and still see the same items staring at you. This doesn’t seem to make sense given that to do items are usually always time-sensitive (this is a calendar application, remember). These are the things I have to do today, or these are the things I have to do before the meeting tomorrow, or these are the things that I have to do on the way home from picking Sally up from karate class.
To do lists and reminder systems are very subjective, of course, and one person’s Palm Pilot is another person’s scribbling on the back of their hand. It’s possible that iCal’s method makes perfect sense to you, but it strikes me as ineffective and potentially counterproductive in that we tend to come to ignore things which are constantly in our field of vision. If the items in the list changed to reflect the current view of the calendar, I’d be more inclined to pay attention to them. They risk becoming part of the visual furniture if they just sit there like that.
The Info window
This behaves pretty much as you’d expect, allowing you to set the start and end times for events as well as other properties. A major beef here is that you cannot use the Tab key to move to the time fields: you have to mouse to them, click to select them, and then make the changes. This is a huge oversight and severely reduces the usability of the program.
The five buttons across the top of the Info window show the default properties pane, Alarms, Recurrences, People, and Notes. The People pane looks interesting. You can drag names from the People window onto an event and they are added to a list of invitees for that event. The People pane of the Info window then provides a “Send Invitations” button which notifies the invitees of the event. How it does this, I don’t know. I tried to invite myself to an event but haven’t received notification either through iCal or Mail.app.
I thought perhaps iCal would send a canned letter via the default account in Mail to all of the recipients (since it’s their mail addresses we have access to via the contact database). But it may be that this function works only with people who have subscribed to a particular calendar that you publish online. I haven’t checked iCal’s Help because, well, the Help viewer sucks in Jaguar right now and I’m not going to sit here the rest of the night waiting for it to open.
Quirks
When changing to day view from month view, I noticed that a different day would be displayed to the one I was viewing in month view. This was happening randomly but consistently, and then I realised why. Before changing to day view I was clicking outside of the current day (somewhere in the month) to deselect any items. What i was doing was actually selecting a new day, and it was this day that was then displayed in day view. The problem is that the default selection colour is nearly invisible from any angle on the LCD screen. Why on earth these colours were chosen (and, more importantly, why they are not user-definiable) is a mystery. People with less than very acute vision and colour perception will be frustrated.
In month view, items are displayed without their start time (a space-saving measure, I suppose). Now Up-to-date handles this just fine, however, and it’s quite handy so I’d like to see it implemented in iCal. To get the time of an event you need to either choose Get Info for that event or switch to week or day view.
The lack of menu equivalents and key commands is, as I’ve already mentioned ad nauseum, a strange and ominous thing. I refuse to believe that it’s a conscious design decision by Apple because it simply represents a big fat counterproductive break with the way people expect the Macintosh to behave. Isolating important features solely in the mouse is a bad, clunky thing to do for most users, and potentially a show-stopper for people who have trouble using traditional input devices.
At the end of the day…
It’s easy to see where Apple is going with its suite of iApps. In the same way that the machine itself is being positioned as the centre of the digital hub (DV cams, the iPod, DVDs and so on), the applications are beginning to talk to each other to allow integrated operation on common tasks that we all need to get done, in this case through the shared medium of the new contact database. iCal is an obvious and crucial part of this strategy (as will be iSync when it is finally released) and it’s important that Apple gets it right. In this sense it’s probably a good thing that iCal doesn’t try to pack in every known calendaring feature right away in order that the features it has shipped with can be polished easily and quickly.
I can’t help but notice how easy Apple is making it to get data out of Microsoft applications like Entourage and into Mail, iCal and the Address Book, and the first step in the iApp strategy is obviously getting people to move to it. The polishing and feature buffness can come later – but not too much later. iCal is a good start for this component, but Apple will need to deliver on its iApp promises in ways that augment the existing Macintosh experience and allow people to leverage what they already know.
iCal is a free 6.8MB download from Apple which requires OS 10.2 to run. A .Mac account or WebDAV server is required for publishing calendars.
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Posted to Computers • 2002.09.11 (Wed) • 01:26
Comments
Posted by stephen haskill 2003.04.09, 22:47
Suddenly iCal stopped giving me notices! Not too useful that way. Maybe an update is on the way! iSync refuses to ignore selected address books so the Palm is a mess! Great ideas, slow implementation.
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