[Christian]

Seeing the complementary work of OF and iCal in the daily struggle to keep our heads above the flood of tasks and priorities, this is a "rant" (don't like the word) about a potentially great feature that has been implemented with such outright stupidity that one could cry. If people like it I might make a series about that, one feature at a time, as long as they are relevant for OF so everybody can discuss. I think this should be here rather than in the lounge since it is here where the "relevant" people for this matter hang out.

Feature Mess*-Up I: iCal and the Heat Map View

One feature eagerly anticipated by many was the year view on iPad. It is actually beyond me why such was not implemented from the start. The leather-bound calendar of my Dad had a year view decades ago. I remember because I drew a lot of lines on it at the age of 5 or so. In a way it looked like icals new heat map style year view: days marked with multiple colors. Now that I think of it, it was actually very much like icals heat map. The different colors did not add any notable value to my dad but tended to get in the way of him using the (otherwise beautifully clean) overview. Call me an entrepreneur. I will sue Apple over the copyrights for this feature.

Did you use icals heat map? On Lion or the iPad? Looks nice, doesn't it? Yes, and it could have been a real killer feature, especially if you have a lot going on. Provided, if you only have an appoint ment at your hair stylist here and there then you might not exactly need it. But if you live on calendars and tasks managers for professional use, like many of us do, then it would be excellent to quickly figure out how much time is so far "unused" in a certain month or other period of time.

Heat map could have done that. It could have told me, at a glance, that most of my days for the next two weeks are completely full, with the exception of next Thursday on which I happen to have three hours left to dedicate to the meeting I am being asked about. That would have helped me.

But no. Heat map rates the usage of hours inappropriate to measure the amount of time one has on a certain day. Instead, it thinks, it is much more efficient to rate said amount of available time by the number of appointments you have on that day. Ok, certainly, if I have many appointments on Tuesday than chances are that I have not as much free time as if I had no appointments on that day.

But hey! Yo! News for iCal: appointments, unlikely as that may sound, sometimes vary in length! And what does, what could that mean for our way to measure available time?

Exactly! It is completely irrelevant how many appointments I have noted down on a certain day. The only relevant factor is how much time those appointments bloc. Sounds easy enough? True! Does iCal do that? No chance in hell.

Example? Certainly:

I did set up test appointments on a random day which so far was appointment-less. I set up one appointment of 1 hour length, then checked heat map for changes in color.
Had changed from white to yellow.
Another appointment, 1 hour length, parallel to the first one (starting and ending at the exact same times of the day as the first one). Guess what? Color change to dark yellow.
Another appointment, parallel again. Orange.

I did this all the way to red. I had in practice blocked 1 out of 24 hours of my day with 6 parallel appointments. No, I would likely not do that in reality but that's irrelevant. What counts is that I blocked 1 hour. I had 23 free hours left that day for whatever appointment I wanted to put there. Yet, using heat map, I would have refused to accept an invitation to a meeting on that day since it appeared dark red.

Apparently, to iCal, 5 parallel appointments mean that I am burned out on that day. Having 23 free hours left does nothing to change its mind.

Despite the frustration and disappointment about this potentially great feature being completely useless I wonder: WTF??

Why does a sane person design software in such a way? And we are not talking a one-man dev company, designing their first iOS app. This is apple, the most valuable company of the world. They likely hire the best of the best for good money. And this is the result? That is pretty miserable.

Sorry, Apple, but you ran this one completely into the concrete wall.