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21 Nov 2004
iCal
You might have noticed that I did not discuss iCal, when talking about MicroContent clients. I was not sure where it would fit in. As OpenEvents are a genuine MicroContent type, according to Marc Canter, one would expect that iCal will fit in somewhere. So time to have a look.
At first look iCal seems to have a three pane interface. The view pane is created as a drawer and shows the details of a single event, such as the from-date/time, the to-date/time, the attendees (a link with the AddressBook), a status (tentative/confirmed/cancelled), repeat (every day/week/month/year/etc.), end-date, alarm-setting (message, message+sound, email, open file), the calendar, a URL-field and a Notes-field.
The categories-pane shows lists, which are called here calendars. With a check-box one can indicate which calendars must be shown in the items-pane. The items-pane is really different from the items-pane in the other MicroContent clients. The items-pane is here a grid, which is defined by time or date depending on the view that is chosen (day/week/month). And the items in the calendars are put on this grid depending on the time or date of the item. It is also possible to view the events in a column-mode. And the to-do-items are also presented in a simple column-mode.
iCal seems to follow the three-pane approach to MicroContent clients. But this does not mean that iCal supports MicroContent. For this to be true it must support subscribing and publishing. And it does. One can subscribe to calendars using a subscribe-option. This will link a public available ical-file into your client. And it is possible to publish (and synchronise) a calendar on a Webdav-server.
Thus iCal really supports MicroContent as I am thinking about it. But I guess there are still some ingredients missing, which ones?