Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Leopard iCal Complaints

I had problems editing an event in my Personal calendar. I couldn't change the times or it would let me and then not retain any of the changes. I could only drag and drop the event in 15 minute increments. I deleted the Birthday calendar and I could then edit my event in my Personal calendar correctly. I brought back the Birthday calendar and it still worked. Very strange.

I don't mind the drawer being gone but if you bring up a popup, make sure the lower portion doesn't appear below the bottom of the screen. Positioning shouldn't be difficult for a programmer to get right.

Double clicking an event sometimes brings it up in edit mode and sometimes in view mode (I think at least when there are unsent invitations to invitees). Make it consistent. It is easier to single click an event and use cmd-E or cmd-I to bring up edit or view (info) mode. But put the Send and Done button in different locations! I've already accidently sent an invitation when I didn't want to. In fact I'd like to be able to disable sending invitations since I'm in a home environment.

Get the freaking tab order right! Select an event, hit cmd-E, the title is selected. Hit tab and the location is selected, great. Hit tab again an the am/pm indicator is selected in the from time, skipping the date and time fields. Hit tab again and the am/pm indicator in the to is selected. Hit it one more time and your at the URL field at the bottom. There's no excuse.

When adding an alarm, the old iCal would remember the last 5 alarm types you used. So if you liked "message with glass sound 15 minutes before" it was easy to pick it again. The new iCal has dropped this. You have to select each of those things every time.

Address Book is smart enough to let you click on an address field and get a google map of the address. Why can't I do this with the location field in iCal? I know it's unstructured, but deal with it.

And let me enter all the info via one field. If I create a new event with the text "12:00 Lunch with John" figure it out. Apple has code to find addresses and even events in Mail messages, use it in iCal!

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