I'm always on the lookout for a better way to maintain and share my
calendar. I currently have a hybrid solution - evolution/webcalendar.
I use evolution to store all of my HP appointments, because it can easily
import ical appointments. It also has a pop-up reminder mechanism,
which is certainly a must. But what sucks is that I want to see/be reminded
of the same appointments whether I'm on my laptop at home, or in the office
on my workstation. evolution doesn't share its calendar with other clients.
Outside of work, I use webcalendar - which is actually pretty feature
rich. It can send e-mail reminders and even has a .ics interface that
evolution can poll. That way I can overlay my (read-only) webcalendar
appointments on top of my evolution calendar, so I only have to maintain
those appointments in a single place, and can still get pop-up reminders.
Unfortunately, this hasn't been working with recent evolutions - and when it
did, it was flaky - random crashes, etc.
A problem with webcalendar is that everyone I invite to an event needs
to have an account. I want to be able to invite anyone in the world, with
just their e-mail address.
When I'd first
read about hula, I let my mind go wild with how it might work. Wouldn't
it be cool if this was just a simple to install/configure/use client that
people could just install and run locally? And then what if all these
clients could somehow be organized into useful groups? Like I could tell
my client that I'm an HP employee, and it could talk to some hp hula server
to see my coworker's schedules? And I could also see my buddy's calendar
that lists all the concerts he's going to this month, by communicating with
his client directly, in an rss fashion? No required central server, just
a client that knows how to collect/post information in standard formats
and present it in a useful way. Well, that's not what hula's all about, it
seems. It looks very centralized, and isn't something many of my friends
could configure themselves.
I installed sid's hula today; which is admittedly about 6 months out of date.
I was initially impressed with the ease of install & the pretty web page,
but quickly became disappointed by the admin architecture. Adding a user
is terribly, terribly non-intuitive. And the whole thing looks overly
complex, like its inherited a lot of design cruft. But, once you log in as
a user, things look fine. hula's calendar looks nice, and I'd seen a
flash video that makes newer
versions look really spiffy. So, I wanted to see if I could easily import
an e-mailed invitation into it. This means I'd need to give hula access to
my e-mail.
You can have hula pull mail from a remote server - I was hoping to connect it
to my imap server as a read-only client for this test. However, it seems
that hula will only pull mail every N hours, where N is configurable
globally. I really just want to have an active imap session, using hula
as a front-end, but that feature doesn't look like its there. I also
couldn't find anyway to import an existing calendar/.ics file.
Anyway, I've seen enough to know that hula isn't going to work for me yet.
It doesn't appear to offer me anything that I don't already have, or simplify
anything I do already have.