Leopard Watch: iCal with CalDAV

Building on Jon Freibourn's comment #9, I agree - cross-platform interoperability is the issue. But even more specifically than having SOME windows clients that can work with CalDAV, the real need in freeing corporate Mac users to interact with their windows counterparts inside and outside their organizations is to have reliable interoperability in calendaring with Outlook users. An appointment should work as an appointment, regardless of what client is being used to work with it. This along with Apple Mail's lack of full html composition capabilities has forced a lot of us to use Entourage...which is less than pleasurable.

The reason this is a problem is that Outlook uses a Microsoft proprietary extended version of the ical stndard...however, there should be a relatively simple way for Mail to recognize and work with this in interfacing with iCal.

Keeping my fingers crossed that Apple gives us this full interoperability with Outlook in Leopard!

To: spencermcchester

The iCal shows the current date when the application is opened. This seems to have been implemented with Mac OS X 10.4.TEN!

I just noticed it this morning. Apple probably got around to taking care of the little things that were delayed in the rush to get out earlier versions.

@9: CalDAV is an open standard. Anyone is free to implement it on any platform they wish.

AFAIK, there are a few projects which have Win32 builds which support CalDAV - Chandler is one, I beleive. Not sure what state its in tho.

Does this mean we'll finally be able to make edits on our online iCal calendars?

CalDev looks great, but unless there's a windows solution for looking and working with the same data, this won't go anywhere. Anyone doing something about this problem?

BUT THE REAL QUESTION IS will the icon still always say JUL 17 unless it's launched? This drives me nuts, moreso when the real date is near JUL 17. It's like some annoying easter egg by a developer born on JUL 17.

Greg

That problem has a good chance of being rectified with Leopard. iCal and other apps can now read/write to a new API called Calendar Store. Now every PIM or application that needs to deal with calendar data can access the unified store without leaning too heavily on loading up iCal (which is what many do today) I'm totally stoked about this because all current PIMs seem to have severe calendar issues and some sync issues that should go bye bye in Leopard.

Gerald: Probably its my bad. From my reading of the CalDAV page (http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/index.html) and http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/rfc4791.html, I just got the impression that Apple might not support the entire protocol.

Finally, we get some simple groupware capabilities that Outlook, PITA that it is, has had for what, 7 years?

Sorry, but I'm really frustrated with my tools of choice for time management. I want something to run locally (iCal, Mail, something for to-do lists and simple project management) and I want it to sync with most anything (preferably Google). Google needs some features in their calendar too, mainly to-do lists.

That's why there is Doodle for us common folks without any calendaring app:

http://www.doodle.ch/