FreeLists / haiku-development / [haiku-development] Re: New project: Address book and calendar app

["Ryan Leavengood" <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 2:52 AM, Jorge G. Mare <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> That would most likely lead to different apps using a different set of
> attributes, creating unnecessary duplication which can become quite
> messy in the end.

I agree there should be a standard for calendar events. But I do not
think a meeting is necessary. I would recommend that Phillipe propose
an Event attribute specification modeled after the People and Email
examples Koki linked to. The prefix for all the attribute types can
just be "EVENT:". Based on the requirements a standard set of
attributes can be defined and the application coded against those. If
more attributes are needed later they can be added to the standard.

Based on a quick perusal of iCal on my Mac, here is a start:

EVENT:description (string)
EVENT:start (time_t)
EVENT:end (time_t)
EVENT:location (string)
EVENT:calendar_type or EVENT:context (string) (Work, Home, etc.)
EVENT:alarm_type (string) (Play Sound, Show Message, Show Message and
Play Sound, Run Script, etc.)
EVENT:alarm_parameters (string) (the sound to play, the script to run, etc.)
EVENT:alarm_timing (string) (I'm not sure of the format of this, but
the idea would be to have the alarm sound 2 minutes before, or an hour
before, or right on time, etc.)
EVENT:attendees (string) (List of People nicknames?)
EVENT:url (string)

Longer descriptions or notes about the event can be stored in the
content of the file, just as Email files have their bodies in the
content.

There should also be some way to have events repeated, but I couldn't
think of a quick and flexible way to do it with attributes, so I leave
that to someone else ;)

It might also be nice to add some GTD (Getting Things Done) ideas to
this. There is plenty on the internet to educate anyone about this
idea, including several GTD-style web applications.

Ryan