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Evidence found for possible upcoming iCal task support on iPhone

by Erica Sadun Feb 1st 2008 at 3:00PM

Today, I was messing around in the Calendar.sqlitedb file associated with the iPhone's on-line calendar application. I was surprised to discover that the onboard calendar contains all the table support needed for to-do tasks, i.e. CREATE TABLE Task (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, summary TEXT, priority INTEGER, due_date INTEGER, completion_date INTEGER, calendar_id INTEGER);.

As of right now, this information is completely useless. Tasks won't sync to or from the iPhone. Still, it's good to see where Apple might expand their software. It's a direction that many users would find helpful. So c'mon, Apple, please add to-do list support to the iPhone.



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Today, I was messing around in the Calendar.sqlitedb file associated with the iPhone's on-line calendar application. I was surprised to...
 

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William

It's sounding like that the iPhone is becoming more and more like the Newton. Pretty soon it will achieve world domination for PDAs.

February 03 2008 at 11:04 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
contato

Erica,

Please add VoiceNotes(Old) for 1.1.2 firmware. Please.
Thanks a lot. Max

February 03 2008 at 10:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jay Riether

Two things:

I think Apple rushed the UI for both touch devices. Give 'em time to work out the UI for all these features. Clearly the platform can support a nearly desktop-like functionality...but the UI has to be as close to intuitive as possible. Each addition needs to be thought through and tested before implementation, because changes to basic operation cause more complaints than limited functionality.

iCal on the touch devices could certainly use a more informative calendar display. Spanning event should have colored bars across days instead of a single dot which can hide multiple events. And that seems easy enough to do by borrowing desktop iCal's calendar's settings, and a simple pull-down on the touch to select/change which sync'd calendar the event is attributed to.

February 01 2008 at 11:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
William Shipley

Actually, "calendar_id INTEGER" seems like a bad sign. On Mac OS X the calendars are identified by UUIDs, which have a ton of hex digits -- they look like this: "1AD85E04-E7BD-4F34-B4DA-FE1C1BB23D91"

You can't encode them as just INTEGERs, so you wouldn't be able to map the iPhone data onto your Mac OS X calendars unless there were some sort of external table.

-Wil

February 01 2008 at 10:38 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to William Shipley's comment
Mo

That was the “Task” table; I'd not checked, but I'd imagine there's a “Calendar” table which has per-calendar (but not per-task) metadata in it.

If you've got to store per-calendar metadata anyway, it makes sense to store the UUID in there in a space-conscious environment, rather than repeating the 36-byte string against every task (though the difference is likely negligible in real terms).

February 04 2008 at 1:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Loris

Actually, the Calendar.sqlitedb already contained those tables running the 1.1.2 firmware (even maybe 1.1.1 ?). So i really don't know when this is going to get featured

February 01 2008 at 10:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Loris's comment
cromas

Yep, it was there in 1.1.1 as well.

February 04 2008 at 11:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh

They should put a little time in making iCal suck a little less first....

February 01 2008 at 9:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sam

Mail notes already have a sync item in Leopard, see http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SyncServicesSchemaRef/Articles/Notes.html

February 01 2008 at 7:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to sam's comment
byron church

Is there a possibility for multiple calendars with colors like in iCal ? I cant tell my To Dos from my To Don'ts ! Not to mention my To Dids and to shoulds

February 01 2008 at 8:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
barry

I need something that tells me what I must "do" for the day displayed on the home screen. I know it might not be popular but my Windows Mobile phone had this down...maybe a ticker on the top of the screen that scrolls the things I need to get done...something like that would make my life much easier....!

February 01 2008 at 6:59 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
De\'z

Dear Apple,

Enable .Mac sync'ing on the iPhone!

February 01 2008 at 6:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
moo

Now for a request that no one thinks of until I mention it, after which it seems obvious:

The ability to set a task that changes the ring. Specifically, setting the phone to silent and back by setting a iCal or iPhone Calendar Task.

Imagine being a student and never worrying about turning your cell off before you walk in to a class. Or if you just scheduled a meeting, imagine if you could turn your cell to silent during the meeting, days or weeks or months or years ahead.

Nice feature, huh? And its pretty damn easy to implement too.

February 01 2008 at 6:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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