Back to the Drawing Board
At five o’clock this morning, I heard Zelda music. My Palm m130 had gone off, loudly, in the office. This was my PDA’s final hurled insult before I removed its batteries.
The paper calendars aren’t working for me. First of all, they’re heavy. My messenger bag needs to be light because I carry it all the time. When I took the calendars (2006 and 2007) out of my bag, it felt quite literally like a significant weight off my shoulders. Secondly, the calendar isn’t searchable. I wrote this off at first and just a geeky form of hunger pangs, but the fact is that there really isn’t a good way to find an appointment when you don’t know when that appointment actually is. What weekend is it that we’re going to Brandon? When am I heading down to visit Jason? You’re reduced to the physical equivalent of a table scan, looking at each record row by row. Finally, because I spend 10-14 hours of my day in front of my computer, it really helps when my computer is the primary entry point for all appointments.There was always a certain amount of inertia that kept me from pulling my calendar out of my bag to check something. As a result, certain things were getting delayed or ignored. The supplemental dilemma here of course and the reason why I need a portable calendar solution in the first place is that people rarely have the decency to email me about possible calendar appointments, so I need an easy way to review my calendar while away from my desk. It doesn’t have to input anything, though, because your appointment is just going to go on an index card for processing when I’m back to my inbox and GTD lists.
Yesterday, I decided to attempt replacement of my paper calendars with my old Palm m130 PDA. I had used it for over a year as an attached-to-the-hip nagging device, and I thought I would give it another go. After all, my application should be simple here, right? I don’t even want it to capture events. I just want them easily displayed for me on the go. And thus began the epic struggle between my PDA, iSync, iCal, and my continued sanity. The Palm wanted to delete appointments in iCal. iCal started respawning appointments—and even calendars—that I had deleted months ago. iSync would just suddenly stop working because of all the freakouts that iCal was having. This in turn caused me to kill off system lockups to do anything on my laptop. Finally after an hour of struggle, I got a complete initial sync on my PDA…only to remember that multiple day appointments weren’t handled appropriately by Datebook, the default calendar program on my Palm. I asked myself a hard question at this point that no geek even wants to ponder. Is this worth my time? Yes, I could tinker for a few days and get everything all set up. I could “fix” records in iCal into a format that Datebook likes better. I could buy software like The Missing Sync and a Datebook replacement. But—and I know that Apple has done this to me—the damn thing should just work with no tinkering required. I’m not trying to force a PDA to do something wacky here. Displaying appointments from a computer calendar is part of the core purpose fo the PDA.
My current intent is to setup my iPod to keep track of my calendar and then just make a permanent spot in my messenger bag for it. It’s an Apple product, you see, so it just works quietly and without complaint. Although, with my current quiet return to Unix command-line utilities, it’s only a matter of time until I hack some connection between remind and my iPod.
Technorati Tags: Palm Devices, PDA, Productivity, OS X, Calendar, iCal