How does iCal suck? Let me count the ways
by Brandon SchauerFirst, for all you Window users out there I need to tell you of something that we should all concede that the Windows OS is superior at: calendaring. MS Exchange certainly has a few issues, but it pales in comparison to what we on the Mac OS have to suffer through, the iCal application. I’m not usually one to blog complaints, but this just keeps gnawing at me. So how does iCal suck? Let me count the ways:
It sucks that I hate to even open iCal. The struggles of time management are made even worse when you abhor the tools.- It sucks that I have a helper app to work around iCal. I bought MenuCalendarClock just so I wouldn’t have to open iCal to see my calendar. Why can this little app access the iCal data instantaneously, when iCal takes decades?
- It sucks that I wait and wait. When I do have to open iCal, I can go make a sandwich, eat the sandwich, then come back and it might be ready (see point 4).
- It sucks that it’s such a tease. Even when you think iCal’s ready, it’ll throw up the wait cursor whenever you want to enter text, change a time, or say, use it.
- It sucks that I have to trick iCal into working. Let’s say I invite someone to a meeting and they decline. I move the time of the meeting, but their “decline” notifications stick with the event. I have to delete the old meeting and create a new one to send out a new invite. Crazy workaround for a way-too-common workflow.
- It sucks that calendar sharing is broken. I’m sure it technically works just fine, but I find that most people’s published calendars aren’t published as regularly as they think they are and the synching usually errors out anyway. The whole reason of being on a common calendar platform is to have these complexities of scheduling smoothly resolved. Oh well.
I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning topped it off with 6 ways, so I will too (even though I’m sure I’ve omitted several of your favorites). I’ll just leave it with a final plea: Apple, please fix iCal… please! Else, you may need to beware the resentful customer (PDF) who may flock somewhere else.
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February 16th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
You might not like the iCal program, but you should at least recognize it’s impact:
It is one of the most widely used formats for calendar programs, both on- and offline. Google Calendar, Thunderbird, etc.
The program begat the format, and now the format is what matters, not the program. Besides, who even uses calendar programs that aren’t web-based anymore?
–Kyle
February 16th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Kyle’s observation is dead on. I like how Google took the format of iCal and then made the rest of the calendaring system work. Note how Pixar, Arizona State, and others are planning to use Google Calendar and other Google Apps as their software suite of choice.
February 16th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Some additional annoyances (or things I haven’t figured out) from a relatively new iCal user…
-When you accept an invitation, you HAVE to click “Reply” vs. just adding it to your calendar. Outlook doesn’t force you to reply.
-You can’t copy stuff from calendars to which you’re subscribed to your own calendar (which means you really can’t edit stuff from subscribed calendars). So I have like 5 different Upcoming.org calendars I’m subscribed to now, each with one event.
But Outlook had its share of problems too, the same thing you described — that you have to open it. I used Outlook ONLY for calendar, not for email. It must assume you’re opening it all the time for your email. But I missed many alerts and almost missed meetings because Outlook was closed.
And I never found a satisfactory widget that would show both Today’s events and Upcoming events. So to do this, I just kept my Outlook calendar synchronized with my Yahoo calendar and depended on Yahoo for alerting. Stupid.
And Google Calendar — I’d love to use it, but it’s such a pain to import iCal things from email. It’s automatic with Apple Mail + iCal. Plus, Google, unlike Yahoo, does not offer a useful app for synchronizing calendars. If only they had the latter, I’d probably use it!
A final note — I probably made it sound like I’m a huge Yahoo Calendar fan. But I honestly use it only for its synching function. I’ve never used its web interface. And I hate having to sign into the Yahoo Calendar widget every time I reboot it — usually that means it’s just sitting there asking me to sign in vs. showing me important events.
I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…
February 16th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
I agree with Brandon on many levels. I think iCal, like many of the iLife-styled apps has been woefully neglected by Apple.
My hopes are pinned on the next version to be released with Leopard. It will have additional group scheduling features (which we seriously need hre at AP) and an API. I hope stability and speed are some of the features that Steve is keeping for a surprise.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ical.html
A quick note to Kyle, the iCalendar format wasn’t the spawn of iCal, it actually existed prior to Apple’s adoption. Though, iCal definitely made it popular and got the format to the masses early on.
February 19th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
As Andrew said, iCal didn’t originate the icalendar format — it’s existed longer than Google Calendar or Thunderbird as well. If you go back to the actual RFC (2445) you’ll see that it was a joint effort of several parties, including representatives from Lotus and Microsoft and dates back to 1998. I remember writing some code to generate appointment files for Outlook before iCal existed — iCal will read them perfectly well, though. iCal has really made calendar feeds popular, but that’s more of an issue of it being seen as a format for public interchange than an actual relation to the format.
February 19th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
[…] adaptive path » blog » blog archive » How does iCal suck? Let me count the ways Brandon Schauer thinks iCal sucks and I must agree (although I do think his Mac might be a bit underpowered; but on the other hand: since when do we need processing power for calendaring?) (tags: calendars software tools criticism mac apple osx) […]
March 29th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
[…] Managing personal and work schedules - At my previous job we used Entourage’s shared project calendar for work and I used my Sidekick II and iCal for personal appointments - an imperfect system to say the least. Adaptive Path uses iCal pretty heavily, so now I can have my personal calendar at home and work. However, I’ve had to break out my personal calendar into 2 - the office needs to know when I’m traveling or at the dentist, but doesn’t need to know when I’m attending a baby shower or going camping with friends. And, as Brandon’s mentioned, iCal has its points of frustration too. […]
April 11th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
and plus, the task manager is teh suck. Tasks tied to days vanish into the past whether they are done or not! Outlook’s task tool is leap years better.
September 10th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
I am one of the most loyal Mac users that I know. Indeed, I am a true fanatic, but I have to wholeheartedly agree…iCal blows!
You know what else totally sucks? The fact that I hate ical so much, that I was driven to google”ical sucks”, just so I can commiserate.
Please Apple… give us a new calendaring app!
September 20th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Re: “-When you accept an invitation, you HAVE to click “Reply” vs. just adding it to your calendar”
Not rocket science, but I just figured out a way to defeat iCal’s insistence that you send an email reply to an invitee when accepting/rejecting an invitation: take the Mac offline before clicking Reply (unplug it, turn off Airport, whatever). Then your acceptance/rejection email can’t be sent automatically, and will instead be sitting in your Outbox where it can be deleted.
December 2nd, 2007 at 11:07 pm
John Maisey’s donationware “iCal Reply Checker” utility works very nicely as well; see his website at http://www.nhoj.co.uk/ . He is also the author of an excellent utility, YAI (”You are Invited”), that translates Outlook invitation emails received by Mail.app into iCal invitations.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
I have had a demo xserve for a week now, all for the purposes of testing iCalendar for our corporate users, and I still can’t authenticate using AD domain accounts. Feeling like I wanted to take a sledge-hammer to it, I instead did a childish “icalendar sucks” google search, just for some sympathy. I’m all about Open Source, but I believed all the hype about Leopard’s iCalendar implementation and “easy integration.” I thought this would be a great compromise with executives who are ready to go with Exchange. This has to be one of the most disappointing and frustrating experiences I’ve had in 7 years of systems administration.
February 18th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I think it’s hilarious that I also came here after search for ‘ical sucks’ because, it does indeed suck the big one. Why don’t appointments that go on for several days show up across those days like in Outlook? Arggh.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:27 pm
The amazing thing is the given Apple’s small biz orientation that they don’t think it’s imp’t to come up with a solution that’s closer (even a bit) to something like NowContact/UTD. If Steve Job’s were to do a survey on how people actually USE ‘address book’, they probably learn that NO ONE is using how they intended. Basically it’s a repository of email addresses one needs in A.B. to readily use AppleMail. Address Book should be a flat field dbase… not this non sense about varying numbers of fields & with varying values assigned to those fields throughout the dbase. Powerful but makes no sense to the avg user, even me. iCal is great if you ONLY have Appt’s and no more than 20 To-Do items. Whose reality is that these days?