4 ms·
Feature Request: Manual Refresh of external calendar feeds
- baptou12 10y agoI was just wondering why a feature as simple as this one with lots of demands is still not implemented (or rejected). (6 years !!)
- sdegutis 10y agoPretty funny how an ambiguous date format ("1/5/10") led to two interpretations of how long ago this was (6 or 10 years ago). To clarify: at the time of initially writing this comment, there were only two comments in this thread: the parent of this comment, which said it was 6 years ago; and another, which said it was 10 years ago. I don't know or care whether it was legitimate for either to come to the conclusion they did, I just thought it was funny, and that it was most likely due to the super-short date format inside the link. Can we move on please?
- jjnoakes 10y agoHow can 1/5/10 be interpreted as 10 years ago? The only two interpretations I can think of are "January 5, 2010" and "May 1, 2010".
- douche 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country Peer into the madness, and quake in fear.
- jjnoakes 10y agoSorry, I understand that different locales use different orderings, and I scanned that chart, but I still don't see how "1/5/10" could have anything but the "10" refer to the year. Is there a country that uses one-digit years in their dates (unless referring to 1AD or 5AD)?
- richrichardsson 10y agoSouth Africa use the Year/Month/Day order, and if one assumes these strings were converted to integers and that the conversion implies any number of preceding zeros are ignored, then that could be 10th of May 2001
- jjnoakes 10y agoI use year/month/day order too (so does ISO) but we all pad out our years to 2 or 4 digits. If the only way to interpret "1/5/10" as 2001 is to assume the formatting is hosed, then I guess one could also assume the character encoding was mangled and the bytes for "1" and "5" should perhaps be in a crazy encoding (think ebcdic on steroids) that maps them to "7" and "-2". So I guess assuming the date "1/5/10" could refer to the year 2BC is about as logical as assuming it could refer to 2001? And the 10th of May, 2001, wasn't 10 years ago anyway (not that it is relevant)...
- mrec 10y agoMy all-time favourite was .NET running in a Thai locale interpreting standard "completely unambiguous" ISO yyyy-MM-dd as a Buddhist calendar year, i.e. Gregorian year + 543. Hilarity ensued.
- dragonwriter 10y agoI don't see where 10ya comes from, but DMY, MDY, and YMD, at least, are all plausible interpretations.
- jjnoakes 10y agoYMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is "1" a year? Unless we're talking about 1AD...
- dragonwriter 10y ago> YMD is only plausible if the first number is 2-digits or 4-digits. How is "1" a year? During the first decade of the 21st Century, I regularly encountered dates, especially handwritten, with single digit years, because some people first reduce to a two-digit year when writing dates, but then -- as with any other number -- leave off leading zeros.
- coldpie 10y agoReally? I don't think I've ever seen this, though I guess I don't deal with a lot of handwritten dates.
- jjnoakes 10y agoThe date in question ("1/5/10") was formatted by a computer, so hand-written dates seem pretty far off topic. But even ignoring that, I've never ever seen a single person write a single-digit year. Not alone ("I graduated in 1" vs "I graduated in 2001"), not in dates ("August 7, 1" vs "August 7, 2001"), not anywhere.
- qw 10y agoThe single digits in the date are not prefixed with a zero. So "1" could be interpreted as 2001. Why would the first digit be prefixed with zero but not the middle digit ("5").
- Riseed 10y agoOne of the comments says: > when I searched on the problem just now, I found complaints about the same problem going back to 2006.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- retox 10y agoUsing a British English copy of android in Firefox the date of the first post is 05/01/2010 for me...
- kalleboo 10y agoYeah, with my Japanese locale it shows up as 2010/01/06
- kentt 10y agoPerhaps it's 2006 years old?
- scholia 10y agoHow can this not get fixed after 10 years? You'd have to assume that googlers use their own Calendar, so why aren't they out with pitchforks to incentivize the programmers? Do the in-house Calendar feeds get refreshed every hour or so?
- gdulli 10y agoSometimes when I use a Google product other than search I wonder if it's more cynical to believe it's in the state it's in because they don't dogfood it, or because they do but they still don't care.
- nevir 10y agoIt's probably a real pain in the ass to fix - with some dumb tech debt reasons why. But, what's probably contributing the most to it is how Google incentivizes people internally. The promotion process is tied very heavily towards launching new features. Maintaining existing products is (often) a bit of a career dead end for Googlers. It's safer to chase some new and shiny feature.
- smhg 10y agoFWIW: Facebook's events feed syncs quite fast in Google Calendar. Certainly a lot faster than feeds of less known sources. My naive assumption is that they prioritize by popularity?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- simonsarris 10y agoReminds me of what's going on right now in Chrome: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016#c53 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...
- adt2bt 10y agoFor all of us HN readers, backspace to go back made intuitive sense from the first time we accidentally hit backspace years ago. However, I imagine for every one of us, there are tens of folks who use computers sparingly and get confused when hitting backspace takes them to a wholly different page. In the end, this might make chrome easier to use for the common man at the expense of a tiny performance hit for power users.
- FreeFull 10y agoI'm a user of Firefox, and have backspace to go back disabled, due to having accidental navigation happen way too many times. When I do want to go back, I can always press alt+left
- patates 10y agoProblem is that you can't press alt+left with one hand. Backspace wasn't reliable but at least it worked when you tabbed away from any active inputs.
- Someone1234 10y agoYou can use alt+left with one hand, just use the right hand alt key.
- FreeFull 10y agoMany keyboard layouts have altgr instead of a right alt key, and it won't work for this.
- drcongo 10y ago
- jjnoakes 10y agoYou get what you pay for. My calendar on my phone routinely forgets to remind me, even though clearly the entry says "remind me 1 hour before" and other events with the same reminders work fine. Are there any good calendar hosting companies where I could pay a few $$ a month for decent features, bug fixes, and service?
- mark_l_watson 10y ago5 minutes ago my FastMail calendar sent me an email reminding me of a dental appointment tomorrow morning. FastMail in general seems reliable (except for the long outage they had 3 years ago).
- jjnoakes 10y agoThanks, I'll look in to it. Hopefully reminders come in forms other than email, there's a decent android app, and I can access an exported ical format programatically for backup purposes.
- brerlapn 10y agoFastmail is quite reliable, and they support CalDAV and CardDAV. Their android email client is fast but doesn't work offline--fortunately they support IMAP Push and work very well with whatever 3rd party email client you prefer. I haven't moved my personal domain over there yet, but I've been using a paid tier for several emails with them for over 10 years and have been very happy. I haven't tried the exported ical format programmatically, but some of their devs are active on HN and if you shoot their help desk a question about it I expect they'll get back to you promptly.
- banach 10y agoMy iOS calendar, synched with Google calendar, always works. Been depending on that form of reminders for at least two years now, and I can't recall ever being let down by it.
- 10y ago
- rietta 10y agoIt's the cult of the API. I have personal experience with this. Because of the lack of reliable iCal sync, a project I worked on had to spend over a week and a half of developer hours implementing, troubleshooting, and maintaining Google Calendar API integration for our users. It's the source of no shortage of pain for this app as it is a sideline feature, but has just enough demand that Google integration cannot be dropped. Google doesn't want to support iCal because they want to have everyone use their API.
- kazinator 10y agoGoogle doesn't care that the Picassa system's servers are used for bouncing spam. The spam arrives with a from-envelope address of "<random-id>@photos-server.bounces.google.com". This has been going on for years and reported to Google repeatedly. They don't give a damn. I bet you my e-mail server has caught this recently. Let's see: # zgrep photos /var/log/exim4/rejectlog* /var/log/exim4/rejectlog.17.gz:2016-07-24 04:34:41 H=mail-qk0-f201.google.com [209.85.220.201] F=<3y6eUVwYUADANRSTQeNRSTQe.kkPQeeM.ebMOQ@photos-server.bounces.google.com> rejected RCPT <ada-mp1-request@kylheku.com>: Too many components in domain name [... snip, a number of hits going back to May ... ] There we go: the most recent spam attempt was on July 24, 2016. Someone tried to use Picassa to spam my ADA MP-1 mailing list. So that's how I'm catching this stuff now: my rule against too many components in the sender domain is taking care of it, currently, before anything more specific. Here is one 2012-dated discussion about this: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/bQd_kZlscFE https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/bQd_kZl... It goes back before that, though, to at least 2010.
- tranv94 10y ago"I hope this can be resolved soon..."- dawnjc79 4/17/12 poor guy
- jeffrand 10y agoI think Google cares, but they're not communicating it very well. I would hesitate before building a feature that might kick off a relatively complicated process with a lot of external factors whenever a user wants. It seems very complicated and without much positive benefit for the average user.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- therealmarv 10y agohey, other google users which are volunteers are answering all your questions. You are not supposed to talk directly to Google! ;)
- raverbashing 10y agoAnother funny Google problem. Backup via adb has been broken since 1.0.32. Nobody cares https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=208337 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=208337
- thinkpad20 10y agoGithub has a similar thing, a issue which has been open for over three years and has received innumerable upvotes[0] with essentially no official response as far as I can tell. [0]: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/18 https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/18
- AdmiralAsshat 10y agoSo, much fun as it is to bash Google, this is a feature request. They're not obligated to implement a free enhancement on any sort of timetable. This isn't like when Google actually broke the telephony in the Nexus 4 and then finally closed the issue with a middle finger: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82949 https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82949
- apatters 10y agoMy mind was blown when I discovered this little gem recently: http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucalande.htm http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ucalande.htm Place a text file at ~/.calendar/calendar with one event per row, containing the date and the title separated by a tab. Type calendar and you'll get a list of what's coming up in the next few days. You're done. Being a venerable UNIX utility there are of course a variety of options (switch to view X days in the future, support for including external calendars, support for recurrence, etc.). Weirdly, it lacks any concept of start and end time, but this is easy enough to simply include in your appointment's title. And no free/busy or special sharing mechanism (though you could certainly compose your calendar of several files and expose them on a web server easily enough). It's not about to replace a full-blown calendar app for power users, but if you're the type of person who has a fairly light meeting schedule and spends a lot of time in a terminal... I was immediately done with all other calendar software and consequently all the problems of said software when I stumbled across this thing.
- leephillips 10y agoEven better is "remind": https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind
- smhg 10y agoAs someone who builds a scheduling product which offers an iCalendar feed for Google Calendar (among others), I have to face this issue on a weekly basis. The most plausible explanation I came up with (and what I tell my users) is that Calendar is maintained by a small team in Switzerland for which this isn't a priority. I don't blame anyone, if true. It might not be easy to fix with little resources. The fact that some feeds sync faster than others (Facebook events) and syncs speed up as time passes, makes for a weird case. Outlook.com or iCloud/iCal sync properly. One of those offer a way out for my users if critical.
- sctb 10y agoThe previous title, “Google just don't care” violates the guidelines by being editorialized. Please use the original title unless it's misleading or clickbait. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- baptou12 10y agoOk sorry :-)
- mark-r 10y agoGoogle is all about scale, and caring doesn't scale. This is part of their DNA. This might seem like a flippant comment, but it explains a lot of the observations I've made of Google over the years.
- TheLarch 10y agoThey'd have a lot more clout if they were customers.
- usmannk 10y agoWas this hidden from the front page?
- leephillips 10y agoIs this just a problem when subscribing to calendars published through Google? In other words, if I host an iCal calendar on my own server, will subscribers see changes immediately when they refresh their Google Calendar client?