25 ms·

The open calendar, task and note space is a mess

• monksy 5y ago
  I've been looking for an iCal server to serve as a database for events. I agree with the author, this space is rather empty. Most of the projects out there have aged quite a bit and could use feature enhancements. (I.e. annoymous RSVPs, flexible notification perefences on a per user basis) I was looking at bedework, however it doesn't deploy very easily. Now I'm looking at Radicale. It does have a docker container, but it's not well documented.
  • rubatuga 5y ago
    Radicale is pretty stable. I’ve submitted a patch in the past and they integrated it pretty quick.
  • offmycloud 5y ago
    I found the Radicale documentation [1] sufficient for setup, and it really hasn't needed much in the way of maintenance. I also enabled the awesome Git integration so that every client-side contact/vCard change becomes a server-side git commit to my contacts repo. Now my birthday greeting script can just "git pull" to get the latest contact data. 1. https://radicale.org/3.0.html https://radicale.org/3.0.html
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• dexwiz 5y ago
  Synchronizing events beetween calendar systems is hard. iCal may be a serialization format, but it doesn't handle things like: sync event from system A to system B, update in System B, how do we tell System A? For simple events with no attendees that is easy. But once you deal with recurring events, and everyone's varying implementations, it quickly falls apart. Internally all the major Calendar services (GCal and Outlook), store events differently when it comes to events with multiple attendees and recurring events, and it takes understanding the varying nuances to perform good synchronization. Even the difference between a timed event and an all day event will vary from system to system. And that barely touches the timezone issues that arise when scheduling.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    Having spend 1/2 lifetime doing this: yes++ Add to all that : the calendaring hosting providers will block your API access to their customers so unless you have a business relationship with them, or the technical solution means that they can't block you, it's a crappy business proposition.
  • mercutio2 5y ago
    The iCalendar RFC doesn’t specify this, but the CalDAV specs work just fine. It’s not trivial, but it’s also not especially difficult to implement. There sure are a lot of productive implementations of clients and servers out there! Admittedly scheduling is hard, and frankly the iTIP model is just not that well suited to most people’s lives.
• torstenvl 5y ago
  I've had good success with Baikal, a sabre/dav-based project, on PHP 8.0. It still is only CalDAV and CardDAV though, no WebDAV for file/note sharing. Installation can be janky and there's no clear documentation on dependencies -- and it'll fail silently if you're missing any. On FreeBSD I install the following PHP packages and then it works splendidly: sudo pkg install php80 php80-dom php80-filter php80-openssl php80-pdo php80-pdo_sqlite php80-xml php80-xmlreader php80-xmlwriter
  • koevet 5y ago
    Been running dockerized Baikal for years on my server. This is the image I have created few years ago (likely newer ones exist): https://hub.docker.com/r/lucianofiandesio/baikal https://hub.docker.com/r/lucianofiandesio/baikal
• smartmic 5y ago
  Isn't the authors conclusion about the fragmented landscape symptomatic for almost all FOSS solutions which try to tackle a specific user need? I think this is a positive development. The diversity and rapid development of technologies requires users to deal with them holistically and, in the best case, to support or develop a new, better solution.
  • djrogers 5y ago
    > requires users to deal with them holistically and, in the best case, to support or develop a new, better solution If you only ever want to serve the 1% that are capable of supporting or developing a new solution, then yes - I suppose this’d be a good thing. In practice though, such exclusionary mindsets never lead to good outcomes - software or otherwise.
    • dasyatidprime 5y ago
      ‘support’ can take the form of financial support, in which case anyone who would be able to pay for SaaSS subscriptions or proprietary software would only have to do something very similar here. The biggest problem there is that the social infrastructure and coordination points don't seem to exist, and that's a place where the fragmentation probably does hit badly, where consolidating users' needs more would let development be much more efficient and coordinated in such a way that crowd financial support would become more economically plausible at least. Of course, there's the free-rider game-theoretic issue, among other things… While there's a lot of issues between “where are are now” and “broadly end-user-friendly libre software support models being common enough to be recognizable and repeatable”, “sure, so long as you can code” isn't meant to be the first answer. It's just become a cultural laughing-point because a lot of people do ignore the issues, and “you can choose whom you ask to handle the code” requires more work on the environment to be practical. IME, “exclusionary mindset” usually has little to do with it. The “VCs have conditioned people to never pay for software, so you may have to have massive scale and run on surveillance capitalism to survive” and “user model of technology being vertically integrated service by default” are of course a whole other environmental game which may crush attempts to make this work.
• ricktdotorg 5y ago
  See also Standard Notes[1], pretty much a drop-in replacement for Apple's iOS Notes app. Decent web interface with (paid) plugins, great desktop and mobile apps, backend can be self-hosted as well. It's really good and its OSS[2]. [1] https://standardnotes.com https://standardnotes.com [2] https://github.com/standardnotes https://github.com/standardnotes
  • djrogers 5y ago
    Hate to be ‘that guy’, but without the ability to share and collaborate on notes, it’s not a drop-in replacement.
    • istingray 5y ago
      Yes, it's not a drop-in replacement. How do we get a drop-in replacement? My take: as customers we have to pay for incomplete solutions and then be vocal customers. Take my money! This is the way. Otherwise "free" and "open source" solutions will just never reach the level of quality needed to take off.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    Standard Notes won't be a competitor in my eyes until they add extentions/theming support to the free tier as well. It's an absurd and zero-margin holdout that makes zero sense and only drives me away from their service.
    • tibyat 5y ago
      Lucky for them, it sounds like you're a zero-margin customer anyway
    • istingray 5y ago
      What do you have against paying? If I'm not paying, I'm the product...and I don't want my private journal to be sold.
      • hammyhavoc 5y ago
• sdze 5y ago
  Horde Project? Old but gold. > https://www.horde.org https://www.horde.org
  • rcarmo 5y ago
    I built two webmail solutions on Horde back in the early 2000s, and it was amazing at the time, but hasn’t aged well. I’d rather use plain IMAP and Radicale…
    • sdze 5y ago
      New Horde is quiet nice. Even ActiveSync is well implemented for most clients.
  • aidenn0 5y ago
    Wow, Horde has really come a long way since I last glanced in its direction. Looks like the "groupware" distribution ticks every box from tFA except for notes being sharable over WebDAV...
• ognarb 5y ago
  Disclaimer: Involved in both KDE (including kde pim and kalendar) and Nextcloud. See bio. * I wouldn't call Nextcloud codebase old. It's a PHP 7.3 codebase with sure quite a lot of legacy stuff but a lot of thing has been improved and refactored with the time. It's maintained, there is an active community and an healthy enterprise behind the project. IHMO this is that matters more than the programming language used. * SabreDAV supports WebDAV and this is that we are using at Nextcloud for our webdav/caldav and carddav support. * KOrganizer does run on Windows but it require to be built from source. I have been told that a better Windows support is being worked on for the entire PIM suite and I hope that at some point exe can be distributed. Technically there is nothing that makes it impossible to use on macOS, we just need more helping hands to help with fixing the platform specific issues. There is also a modern alternative to Korganizer being worked on called Kalendar. More on it can be learned on https://claudiocambra.com/ https://claudiocambra.com/ (Disclaimer: I was the mentor of this GSoC project).
  • skinkestek 5y ago
    I think I will use this opportunity to say thank you! I've loved KDE since I was an almost broke student 17 or so years ago. I also use NextCloud now to sync Joplin, and I contribute to other projects (mostly donations, some code).
  • gerdesj 5y ago
    Thank you for your work. I've used KDE for quite a while and I recall the 4.0 shenanigans and stayed with it. I absolutely love the mad amount of customisation that is available and the breadth and sheer depth of the project. If you could get Kmail/Kalendar to speak Exchange EWS or the like easily then you might unlock a lot of "enterprise" users. I use (Gnome) Evolution EWS on my KDE desktop.
    • ognarb 5y ago
      KMail does speak Exchange EWS, and there was a few big bugfixes merged last week: https://www.davidcbryant.net/wp/2021/08/29/july-august-in-kde-pim/ https://www.davidcbryant.net/wp/2021/08/29/july-august-in-kd... (look for the MS® Exchange Server section). Unfortunately these were only merged in the master branch and not the bugfix branch so that they won't be available to the users before december.
• nicholashead 5y ago
  I switched to Joplin a while back when Evernote decided to implode itself, and stopped iterating on their product. Now I send auto-donations to Joplin devs via Github Sponsorship. Love it. Syncs to my DropBox and I haven't had any issues.
  • lancemurdock 5y ago
    im so bummed on evernote. Ive used them forever. I just needed a note taking app in the cloud. They've evolved into a bloated piece of software thats like a crappy version of google docs. I'll checkout this Joplin app
• trimble_tromble 5y ago
  Consider EteSync as a solution. FOSS, can be self-hosted, available on multiple platforms, etc: https://www.etesync.com/ https://www.etesync.com/
  • vinay427 5y ago
    Seconded. It was a bit more awkward to set up compared to Nextcloud or Radicale (which both support standard DAV) but the Etesync Android client and desktop bridge work very reliably in my experience, and the added bonus is end-to-end encryption. I now have my contacts and calendars on Etesync and haven't needed to touch it, easily configuring it on new client devices as needed.
  • aidenn0 5y ago
    I came here to recommend this. A few notes: 1. There is a CalDav/CardDav bridge which lets you use apps that don't implement the ETE protocol which is good because... 2. The iOS app is nigh unusable. It is painfully slow, requires manual syncing, and if your screen turns off in the middle of a sync, it may get killed by iOS forcing you to start the whole thing over again. Just set up the DAV bridge and use iOS's native DAV syncing.
• nixpulvis 5y ago
  Add email and contacts to the list while you're at it.
• poetaster 5y ago
  Just 1 for sogo from the server side.
• poetaster 5y ago
  I've used the whole citadel stack. It's fun. And i really enjoyed using it in text only cli bbs mode. In the end, since it was src install at the time, couldnt get the others (tm) to support. So, we went for sogo.
• yosito 5y ago
  I'm using Nextcloud for calendar and tasks, and I keep notes in plain markdown files that are also synced with Nextcloud. On Android I use Nextcloud Notes, Nextcloud Tasks and https://github.com/Etar-Group/Etar-Calendar https://github.com/Etar-Group/Etar-Calendar These are by far the best note and calendar apps I've used. Far better than Google's options. Apple's reminders are a bit better than Nextcloud Tasks, but the only feature I'm sorely lacking there is repeating tasks. Google doesn't support this either, which leads me to believe that it's a shortcoming of the CalDav spec for tasks.
  • avuton 5y ago
    If you're on Android, I suggest tasks.org, it supports repeating tasks even if the server doesn't. Of course that means you have to use it when completing a repeating task.
    • yosito 5y ago
      Thanks! This is the kind of tip I'm here for!
• hkt 5y ago
  I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned Zim: https://zim-wiki.org/ https://zim-wiki.org/ From their site: " Zim can be used to: Keep an archive of notes Keep a daily or weekly journal Take notes during meetings or lectures Organize task lists Draft blog entries and emails Do brainstorming" Zim itself is a good desktop application and Markor is a good mobile client for it. Sync can be done via nextcloud, dropbox etc. I'm not 100% on the state of the windows support, but I use it daily and it is great. It coexists nicely with version control, too.
• aantix 5y ago
  Curious - for meeting availability. If I have a Google Business account for my company, jim@mycompany.com - and an external client of mine, tom@myclient.com, wants to see my availability, if he adds my external email address as an attendee, will he see my availability?
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  After writing 2 calendar programs, I came to conclusion nothing beats pen and paper for keeping todos and personal tasks. I bought a large wirebound sketchbook, and fine tip pen. Plan my day, then take a photo of my day's or weeks tasks. Very fast to do, plus all the freedom and sensory experience of drawing on paper. Works for me. I guess its a hybrid of manual and digital.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    To me, paper doesn't work for calendaring and to-do because it simply has no way to beep at you to tell you to get off your backside and get a piece of work done. I'm happy it works for others, but I simply need a digital solution for this.
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  I think the whole area (rightly) suffers from "Bikeshed" syndrome - this is something everybody can have an opinion on, and 90% of the time their opinions are right for them. At work you know someone who schedules appointments with themselves just to block out some time, or schedules meeting with you because emails don't get a response and ... The solution is not more protocols, or opinionated software. The solution is that every individual should have the skills (software literacy) and the infrastructure (some combination of a diary server with an API in fifty languages) and tools (come on iPhone, really whatever you are doing it's a total mess) At some point with Mailbox any coder will have built an sub-AI agent from 200 regexes - and that's probably what will smoosh out across the world - oh yes I let my Virtual AI / PA handle that, it was coded by my brother in law and I made a few config changes.
• epberry 5y ago
  Psssst https://calendso.com/ https://calendso.com/
• deleted 5y ago
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• frunzales 5y ago
  What's the current status of the kolab.com suite? I vaguely remember using it in late 2000s
  • Jedd 5y ago
    Likewise, I expected kolab to appear in TFA's list of evaluated options, as I knew it has been around for a while and covered most (all?) of the author's requirements. IIRC it was a key element in Munich's initial 'let's move to GNU/Linux' project, so I imagined it had received a LOT of updates for those few years. The repo [0] looks like it's still getting lots of love. The commercial entity doing much of the free software development runs a hosted version [1], which is also encouraging. [0] https://git.kolab.org/source/kolab/ https://git.kolab.org/source/kolab/ [1] https://kolabnow.com/ https://kolabnow.com/
  • dugite-code 5y ago
    I personally soured on Kolab after the whole roundcubenext debacle. Also I ended up having some serious issues because files are stored in IMAP on Kolab What about Roundcube Next? - https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/issues/6030 https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/issues/6030 In 2018, RoundCube Next Remains Dead In The Water - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RoundCube-Next-2018 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RoundCub...
• AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  This is ridiculous. The guy just goes around bashing everything that's not Rust as "old". He even claims Java & C "is not very suitable for cross-platform world". So obviously his conclusion is "I'll have to write something in Rust!". Huge world of "groupware" software around. Think Zimbra. Owncloud is hardly the only choice here...
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    Java is literally one of the native languages of Android, and runs everywhere on the desktop. It's practically the definition of cross-platform.
    • bschwindHN 5y ago
      Does anyone ship Java on iOS? That's maybe what is holding the author back, not sure.
      • twodave 5y ago
        I would contend shipping native code on any mobile platform for a calendar app is overkill, personally.
      • selfhoster11 5y ago
        Codename One has support for an iOS target, from what I can see. Even if it wasn't supported on one platform, it hardly would make Java a legacy language.
      • lmm 5y ago
        Only as paid third-party thing IIRC. But that's still going to be orders of magnitude easier than shipping something in Rust for iOS.
      • vbsteven 5y ago
        I did not succeed yet and iOS was indeed holding me back to use Java (or Kotlin, my preferred JVM language). Since a few weeks I've ditched my iPhone because of to the upcoming CSAM scanning changes and I'm back on Android. By dropping iOS as a requirement, Kotlin/JVM is feasable again for all my personal target platforms and I've decided to use that as the main language for my system.
• codethief 5y ago
  Can anyone here recommend a slick open-source GUI calendar app for Linux with support for iCal, WebCal, recurring events and notifications? I've been following GNOME Calendar[0] for a while but judging by the website it's still mostly WIP. I've been using Thunderbird's Lightning add-on for a lack of alternatives but it's mostly been a PITA. [0]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Calendar https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Calendar
  • bestouff 5y ago
    So far I've always used Evolution and I like it pretty much. It even connects to my team's O365 stuff.
  • input_sh 5y ago
    I love the one that comes with elementary OS[0]. Looking at those screenshots, it seems to be a fork of Gnome's calendar? I've connected it to both Google Calendar and Nextcloud's calendar, and it works perfectly well, provides notifications, recurring events, and I can quickly access today's events just by clicking on the clock on the bar. No complaints what so ever. elementary's tasks app, on the other hand, is still WIP. [0] https://github.com/elementary/calendar https://github.com/elementary/calendar
    • codethief 5y ago
      Thank you so much, this is exactly what I've been looking for!
  • wastholm 5y ago
    I've been using KOrganizer[1] for longer than I can remember. For better and/or worse, it's pretty tightly integrated with the Plasma desktop. For now at least, I use it with Google Calendar as its backend. Every once in a long while, it gives me some scary-sounding error message about failing to sync — but so far as I can tell the sync works just fine, albeit sometimes with a bit of lag. I recently also started using it with my work-mandated Office 365 calendar. According to some docs somewhere that I can't find right now, there were quite a few hoops to jump through to make that read/write so I settled for read-only. [1] https://apps.kde.org/korganizer/ https://apps.kde.org/korganizer/
• vbsteven 5y ago
  I'm the author of the article, it's always fun to see your own articles pop up on HN unexpectedly. This post was written several months ago and in the meantime I have given up on trying to cobble something together using existing solutions because they don't provide the extensibility that I want. I'm building my own replacement from scratch focussing on tasks/projects/calendars first. The architecture is a postgres db exposing CRUD API endpoints and all changes are broadcasted over MQTT so I can easily hook into everything for automation and extension. I have a desktop application in JavaFX and a mobile Android app so I can use Kotlin as one language across all clients and backend. Lots of code sharing going on for things like API models.
  • 0xCMP 5y ago
    I planned to comment on the conclusion as well. I think these protocols often do not handle things well enough and in the end the apps out there do not implement them properly anyways. You always end up building some kind of CRUD/RPC thing that works via HTTP/WebSocket which is why things like Todoist and etc work well and are able to add the features everyone wants in the end.
    • vbsteven 5y ago
      This is what I concluded as well. The end goal for my desired system is to make it straightforward to hook into events so I can add automation. This turns out to be very hard to do based on CalDAV/WebDAV protocols because many clients and services implement the spec differently or only parts of it. That's why I switched my approach and I'm writing my own backend storage layer that has my desired event system builtin on that layer (Using Kotlin/JVM for the backend, postgres for storage and MQTT for pub-sub to events). On top of that storage/api layer I'm building CalDAV/WebDAV support so external clients can connect to it. Having my own HTTP+MQTT API makes it a lot easier to build modern clients as well. In fact because I chose Kotlin/JVM as my baseline and have already written a pure Kotlin client library I'm making a lot of progress on both desktop, android and cli tools to interact with the system.
      • ByteWelder 5y ago
• cweagans 5y ago
  Pretty sure the Sabre website is out of date. sabre/dav requires PHP 7.1+ || 8.0+ per https://packagist.org/packages/sabre/dav https://packagist.org/packages/sabre/dav
• akshayB 5y ago
  I worked on a project sometime ago where we needed to create a special event handling calendar with a Todo list for a large organization. It's crazy to deal with Google / Microsoft emails & calendars and on top of all that you need to handle iOS, Android devices & Outlook as well. We ran to bunch of issues with background sync and enormous attachments. At the end we just ended up using slack bot and a internal blogging tool to handle the whole thing. Calendar and notes are vitally important but with all customization / fragmented ecosystem thing become challenging.
• deleted 5y ago
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• deleted 5y ago
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• josephwegner 5y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with the author. I also find this to be true of email clients. GMail reigns supreme, but there is pretty much no email client out there that is: - A good UI/UX - Doesn't store your data in their cloud - Is cross-platform (even just iOS/OSX, but certainly not iOS/OSX/Windows/Android). Thunderbird is one of the only contenders here, and I find the UX of Thunderbird to be abysmal. I've started to kickoff a project to fill this space, but admittedly it's a big project and doomed for the shelf :/
  • Silhouette 5y ago
    The problem with a lot of these applications today is that they work with the kind of information you want might want immediate access to from many devices. That means cloud-hosted options have a compelling advantage in convenience, which for many users will inevitably outweigh any security and privacy concerns. I would love for the FOSS community to come up with a simple, SOHO-friendly server/appliance to act as the central repository for information like messages and calendars and be accessible to all devices on the local network (or via VPN from outside). Then we could have some competition for favourable UIs without every application having to reinvent the wheel for all the back end protocols and formats. Sadly the experience of applications like Thunderbird suggests there isn't currently a critical mass of interest in working that way and most of the market is willing to tolerate the downsides of the cloud applications in exchange for better UIs and more convenience.
    • hammyhavoc 5y ago
      Hypothetically, aggregating your email to a specific client hosted on your server then using JMAP (not IMAP!) would be what we are all waiting for. However, interest in JMAP isn't really there.
  • poetaster 5y ago
    I'm probably mad but i like claws mail. I also use it for caldav meeting mails and as an rss feed reader.
  • elcomet 5y ago
• kstrauser 5y ago
  Citadel has been around forever, but I've only played with its BBS functionality. Has anyone tried it for calendaring etc.?
• fuzzy2 5y ago
  Loosely related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28353718
• pimlottc 5y ago
  I’m frustrated that adding and tracking public events is still so primitive. Why can’t I just click a button and follow all the local events for my favorite artist/venue/team/theater/charity? Why do I still have to manually create events and copy and paste details? Why are there so few “add to calendar” and why do they often fail? Part of it is down to the failure of micro formats and the semantic web, but it would seem like with today’s technology it wouldn’t be to hard for a browser extension to recognize an event and automatically extract the correct details (title, place, date, time).
  • armchairhacker 5y ago
    Personally i have a better experience, with most places sending me an email that says“ Do you want to add this event?” And i click yes and it gets added to my calendar with location or Zoom link, etc. I also had a shared calendar with all of the events for my lab synchronized. I don’t think this is open calendar because it was Google, but it made events pretty seamless.
    • pimlottc 5y ago
      Gmail does a pretty good job with this, but there are some scenarios that don’t work properly; if I recall right, one is when you get a forwarded invite, you get the “add event” dialog on desktop but not on mobile.
  • hannasanarion 5y ago
    Third party services are totally capable of this. Google Calendar has a "subscribe to calendar" feature that puts every event in somebody else's calendar into yours. I know of several clubs and fandoms that use this feature to track public events, and at least one music venue near me uses it as well.
    • killerdhmo 5y ago
      Agreed! and they do this for holidays, sport games, all sorts of stuff. Add Calendar > Browse Calendars of Interest. The gym I go to also publishes their calendar as a google calendar I can subscribe to. So maybe it's more of the adoption concern that the GP is highlighting.
• irl_ 5y ago
  Missing from almost every calendar hosting thing I've used is the ability to publish free/busy information to allow others to schedule me into meetings without needing to be on the same system. I'm pretty sure vCalendar supports this, just no one has implemented it. If I could host a lightweight javascript app that let you browse the information until your client supports it properly that'd be cool.
  • poetaster 5y ago
    I use claws mail for this. I get invites from caldav and reply directly in my mail client. Cal views are primitive.
  • acomjean 5y ago
    Lotus Notes had that. Administrative staff could look at your calendar and sign you up for things.. Of course all Notes Mail and Calendar are just Notes Applications built upon its nosql database and lotus script. Its why they were kinda awkward. But I worked briefly at IBM making custom business Apps with Notes, which was a decent/ fairly easy way of making custom applications for businesses last century.
• djyaz1200 5y ago
  I'm surprised I haven't heard of a "Twilio of Calendars" that just makes this all dirt simple and easy to integrate into any 3rd party application quickly and comes with user configurable UI libraries for mobile and desktop etc. If this does exist please let me know because I've been looking and would pay for it.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    I own a company that did/does this. It's not attractive from a business perspective. Huge amount of detailed work required to get/keep working; hosting providers shaft you (see post above); nobody wants to pay because "gcal is free".
  • georgeashworth 5y ago
    Not affiliated, but I would check out Nylas: https://www.nylas.com/products/calendar-api/ https://www.nylas.com/products/calendar-api/
    • singingwolfboy 5y ago
      I would strongly recommend steering clear of Nylas.
      • deadbunny 5y ago
        Why? Hard to take a recommendation with zero context.
        • hammyhavoc 5y ago
          Read the forums. No support provided.
• wayoutthere 5y ago
  This is a problem with all of these tasks having similar, overlapping use cases and similar, overlapping technology implementations. There are also remarkably few standards for the things around calendars, so most clients kludge something up with structured data sent over e-mail. Which leads to every implementation having its own, non-compatible spec. Even something as simple as forwarding calendar invites can have dramatically different functionality between two systems. I was at a company that ran split-brain between Google and Lotus Notes and it was an absolute nightmare that effectively broke calendaring for 2 years because you could only forward events one way, and acceptances wouldn’t flow back up the chain because some of the clients used a different mechanism for signaling acceptance. This has all been a problem for decades. The business world solved this by just forming a consensus on Outlook / Exchange in the mid-2000s; if you use any other combination you have to accept that there will be dropped communications with those who use the standard stack.
• jsilence 5y ago
  OP might want to take a closer look at SoGo.
  • Arathorn 5y ago
    +1 to SoGo
• neilv 5y ago
  If tackling those 3, please consider making it 4, by also tackling contacts.
• deleted 5y ago
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• guerrilla 5y ago
  > Written in old PHP and there is work underway to do a complete rewrite in Golang Wow [1], how cool would that be. I love that NextCloud exists and I plan to use it and call me biased but god I hate to be running some PHP. I used to maintain a vulnerability database and I don't think I can ever trust a PHP project again at this point. Maybe things have changed but you'd find it very difficult to convince me. 1. https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/16726 https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/16726
  • ognarb 5y ago
    Disclaimer: I work for Nextcloud but opinion is my own and not the one from my employer. There is no work underway to port Nextcloud to golang. That would be a bit crazy since all the plugins and apps wouldn't work anymore (and there are tons of them) and even just rewriting the core would take years. Owncloud is trying to rewrite their core since two years and it is still only a tech demo and many features are lost compared to their php based product. (They are also doing weird thing like taking nosql to seriously and not using at all a sql database just files, that probably doesn't help...)
    • mastazi 5y ago
      Thank you for confirming that there is no "big rewrite" madness going on. I rely on Nextcloud daily and I was worried.
• blackbear_ 5y ago
  Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but Org-mode for Emacs [1] is just great, and fits very well to the requirements: - Source of truth: these are text files, so any of git, nextcloud, syncthing etc. will do. - Consistent interface: using emacs might be tough on mobile, but there are some pretty good web interfaces for it [2]. I personally use Orgzly [3] and syntching on my Android - Standard protocols: custom scripting does anything. ical is pretty easy to handle, not sure about webdav. - FOSS: check - Multiple calendars: yep, via Org agenda [4] - Subtask support: As deep as you can go - Custom logic: via emacs scripts (or some creativity if you're using other clients) - Markdown notes: yes, minimal differences between org mode and markdown [1] https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/ [2] https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web [3] https://www.orgzly.com https://www.orgzly.com [4] https://orgmode.org/manual/Agenda-Views.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Agenda-Views.html
  • yewenjie 5y ago
    Yes. Org mode is fantastic. However, some limitations/ drawbacks. - org-agenda is slow and completely unusable if you have hundreds of org files. - despite multiple half-baked efforts there is still no easy-to-use parser and pretty printer for the lanuguage. I'm not even asking for 100% of the syntax, 20% capability of t he built-in org-element API with good documentatiom will accomplish 80% of the requirements. - no easy way to integrate calendars and org-agenda with something like a calDav server.
    • all2 5y ago
      That last point is what gets me. I very much want my org-agenda to be linked to the calendar app on my phone. No easy way to do this, so far.
    • blackbear_ 5y ago
      > no easy way to integrate calendars and org-agenda with something like a calDav server. It would be great to have something like this. I have a system which can at least handle invitations to events by means of a python script that convert iCal files to Org-style headers. It is triggered automatically via inotify so that every time a new iCal file appears into a specific folder it is appended automatically to an Org file. Now I simply save the .ics that comes attached to event invitation emails to have the time slot booked in my Org agenda automatically.
• d--b 5y ago
  Yes well. On one hand people are angry when big tech roll out closed protocols. And on the other hand open standards get criticized for being messy…
• pmlnr 5y ago
  Cyrus has a built in card/caldav support. Nextcloud works just fine with davx on android and evolution on linux for car/cal/tasks. Radicale is fine for card/cal, but it's basic. This scene used to be a lot worse.
• pseudalopex 5y ago
  The Cyrus IMAP server has CalDAV, CardDAV, and WebDAV modules.[1] [1] https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/download/installation/manage-dav.html https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/download/installation/manage-...
  • chrismorgan 5y ago
    And JMAP, which makes an excellent foundation for client development, web and otherwise. Cyrus implements the calendaring and contacts drafts, counterparts to CalDAV and CardDAV. (See https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/active/#jmap https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/active/#jmap for the active drafts. JMAP working group minutes from IETF-111 last month say of jmap-calendars, “hopefully finalise by end of the year” <https://tools.ietf.org/wg/jmap/minutes https://tools.ietf.org/wg/jmap/minutes>. JSCalendar, which it also depends on, was published last month as RFC 8984.) Fastmail’s web app—mail, calendar, contacts and everything else—is built on JMAP, though it doesn’t yet support offline synchronisation which JMAP is well designed to support. (Fundamentally, JMAP is an object synchronisation protocol, not an email protocol or anything like that.)
    • hammyhavoc 5y ago
      Is there anything better than Fastmail currently in the JMAP space?
• bbertelsen 5y ago
  In the notes field: Notable, Joplin, and recently been looking a lot at Dendron which has tight integration with vscode. Notable/Jopline are standalone apps. The promise of Geary never really materialized. I think they tried to get funding a while back but couldn't hit their, arguably lofty, goals. It's still great, but limited, software.
  • hammyhavoc 5y ago
    Dendron looks very interesting. What's the catch? Currently using Joplin.
• pbnjay 5y ago
  I wrote a mostly-complete Go implementation of the iCal protocol last year. It was eye-opening but interesting.
• normaler 5y ago
  I habe been using radikale for 3 years now. Works really well for calendar and contacts. Tasks is okay aswell, but I never tried it for notes.
• eptcyka 5y ago
  I came to the same conclusions, but I settled for Nextcloud. It is dogslow when ran from a nixOS VM, and I can't quite figure out why.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• peterburkimsher 5y ago
  I wrote my own Notes app, for much of the same reason: I want to control the data, and keep it local on the device (not synced to a cloud service). The major feature that was lacking with the built-in Notes app is a folder hierarchy. When I have ideas about software I want to code, hardware I want to build, or a shopping list, or a band I want to check out - I don't want these to all be stored in one long "Notes (723)" news feed where I'll forget it if I don't handle it immediately. Back in the days of the iPod (call me old), it was easy to have a folder hierarchy for Notes (though I admit that they weren't editable). There were third-party apps like Check Off that would sync a to-do list automatically, but only as a single file. When the iPhone arrived, iTunes gained the ability to sync Notes, but only as a flat folder structure. It's true that SQL doesn't have folder hierarchy so it's harder to code, but I'd rather categorise ideas like they come in my mind! Apple removed the feature of local Notes sync in Mac OS 10.9 Mavericks. Calendars stuck around a little longer, but I moved to BusyCal when the GUI was redesigned in 10.10. Currently I'm using Mac OS Server 5.6 on Mac OS 10.13 to host a local calendar and email server. Apple removed Calendars and Contacts from Mac OS Server in Mac OS 10.14 Mojave. The recommended replacement is CalendarServer, Copyright (c) 2005-2017 with a note that says "The developers ... have each moved on to other projects". Apple recommended this in December 18, 2019 according to the "Published date". https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312 Apple removed syncing Apps with iTunes 12.7. The message is clear: Apple are not interested in letting you manage your digital life - you must use iCloud and store it on their own servers. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/86890 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/86890 I miss the Digital Hub strategy where there is a Source of Truth that isn't owned by Apple or Google. The cloud is just someone else's computer, and if/when Apple/Google/Spotify/Facebook decided to lock me out of my account, I don't want to lose my photos, notes, music, contacts, bookmarks, calendars. https://xkcd.com/908/ https://xkcd.com/908/
• lawrenceyan 5y ago
  A Google Calendar / Google Keep combo works pretty well for me. Cross platform compatibility is decent too.
  • guerrilla 5y ago
    They are looking for an open platform and are privacy conscious, as per the first paragraph. Anything google doesn't meet the basic requirements.
    • lawrenceyan 5y ago
      I mean I think https://policies.google.com/privacy https://policies.google.com/privacy is pretty decent. What would you change?
• dd444fgdfg 5y ago
  Author says PHP, Java and C are not suitable for the cross-platform world. Hmmm.
• gego 5y ago
  ...anyone still uses TheBat on Windows? I liked it a lot and it had notes, tasks, calendar included...
• donatj 5y ago
  > Written in old PHP, according to the homepage it requires PHP 5.4 Just because something will run on an old version of PHP doesn't mean it won't run on new PHP. You can write PHP that is backwards compatible but still decently modern sans typehints. I used Sabre for a while recently on I think PHP 7.3 and it's not bad.
• louis-lau 5y ago
  I'm using the built in calendar application on windows. It's hidden under a hacky workaround, but it has caldav support. You have to add an icloud account, and then edit the server address in the settings afterwards. Has worked flawlessly after that, and I like the integration with other parts of windows.
• criddell 5y ago
  Did you ever check out the Chandler Project? https://www.chandlerproject.org/ https://www.chandlerproject.org/
  • multani 5y ago
    No updates since roughly 10 years, the homepage is full of spam, I don't think Chandler should be recommended anymore at this stage.
• crispyambulance 5y ago
  Calendars. Many people have died on that hill. I remember when Chandler was supposed to be the last word in calendars. Even Mitch Kapoor of Lotus123 fame got involved (https://www.chandlerproject.org/ https://www.chandlerproject.org/). There's something very Bermuda-triangly about Calendar applications. Why is it that in the year 2021 no one has truly cracked the problem yet?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • LeonB 5y ago
    I was wondering if someone would mention Chandler and indeed - two mentions. Interesting chapter (blind-alley?) of history, with a lesson in there somewhere.
    • mercutio2 5y ago
      The Calendar bits of Chandler were just fine, it seemed to me (but I would say that, I wrote a chunk of it). We just didn’t figure out what we wanted to do with Chandler until it was too late. The actual final release had the bones of a pretty great organizational system, albeit mixed with the carcass of half a dozen other things we’d tried.
  • paxys 5y ago
    Because calendars are a social rather than technical problem. Apart from the very basics like sending and accepting invites (which existing protocols have already solved), there is no way any large enough group of people will agree on a single process for such complex social interactions. This is the same reason why email hasn't been able to evolve in any substantial way in the last 30+ years.
• ryanmentor 5y ago
  RFP coordination systems to solve this mess I'm asking as coordinator of Moonshot Collective, where our mission is to build coordination tools. We have builders standing by for exactly this - please give me ideas so I can give them to my teams to build. What are your ideals for these solutions? What are the best solutions you've seen?
• mastazi 5y ago
  > Cons: > Written in old PHP and there is work underway to do a complete rewrite in Golang I will never understand "the big rewrite" philosophy, no matter how many times I hear it. Are some languages better than others in some aspects? Yes, but: 1. if you think that changing language is the only way to make a codebase secure, then there is something wrong with your security practices. 2. if you think that rewriting in another language is the only way to improve code quality, then there is something wrong with your software development practices. 3. chasing "the hot new thing" is a never ending cycle. Choosing something like a calendar client based on what language it's written in, instead of its merits as a client, is such a ludicrous concept.
  • ggm 5y ago
    how long do you expect the underlying older PHP basis to be supported as a module in apache, or run viably through whatever nginx does? what guarantees of backporting CVE security issues is there? This wasn't just hatred of PHP (its a C like syntax. low barrier to entry) -It was about OLD php. Depending, formally (it may work on new PHP but it isn't clear. it might use deprecated language features or side-effects which dont work that way any more in newer language platform) on the old language spec can be a nightmare. Plus, if its in a language you don't "like" then local mods are harder. Would you e.g. run a Rust binary, if every other dependency you had was in GO? Or, APL, if nothing else you ran was in APL? Some choices about language make sense, if you consider the full ecology of running a service on a host.
    • dugite-code 5y ago
      Except it's not old PHP? Nextcloud stable officially runs on PHP7.4 and that is still officially supported for a little while yet. I personally run it on PHP8 with no issues https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php Edit: Also the docker image is updated to PHP8 for NC22: https://github.com/nextcloud/docker/pull/1563 https://github.com/nextcloud/docker/pull/1563
    • mastazi 5y ago
      > how long do you expect the underlying older PHP basis to be supported You can keep software up to date without rewriting in another language, which is what Nextcloud did by the way, as it runs perfectly on my box with PHP 7.3.
• acidburnNSA 5y ago
  I wrote up my solution to this a few years ago here [1] and it ended up giving me my first ever top of HN post [2]. Radicale + Thunderbird + OpenTasks + DAVx5 works great for me. [1] https://partofthething.com/thoughts/host-your-own-contacts-and-calendars-and-share-them-across-devices/ https://partofthething.com/thoughts/host-your-own-contacts-a... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14836265
• ggm 5y ago
  I think the primary point of the article is true: the open source space for these tools, is a giant mess. It depends on archaic (in internet-dog years) spec, on old platforms, on inter-platform mashups, it has standards-interpretation differences, the big players are doing things which become lockin, nobody is thinking about how to do this well enough you'd commit to it, cross-platform, without inheriting decisions for the future in terms of maintenance. Its not how we want it to be. The problem is, this is a big problem space and has a lot of complexity underneath. Not the least being that "timezones, are in so many ways, a complete mess"
• whamtet4 5y ago
  Hasn't anybody heard of vi todo.txt?
• diskzero 5y ago
  They are very old and have accrued quite a bit of legacy By release 2.0 of any project, some amount of "legacy" will have been achieved. "Quite a bit of legacy" can be seen as an indicator of platform success. Is the legacy acting as an impediment to future growth or feature development? Is the legacy due to supporting a user base that is neglected by other "modern" projects? The amount of users that get disenfranchised by someones idea of new and modern can be disheartening. There are libraries for languages like PHP, Java and C but these implementations are typically unmaintained and because of the nature of these languages they are not very suitable for the modern cross-platform world. This is a most surprising quote. I am not a PHP expert, but C and Java are quite excellent for use in multi-platform projects. WASM makes C even more relevant for browser hosted code. The author later states that he has implemented a prototype in JavaFX. So much for legacy platforms. There is a lack of libraries implementing these protocols, ... but these implementations are typically unmaintained And now we can begin to understand why. I do not want to make value judgements on the motivation of people desiring to start new projects. It can be fun and liberating. Having the ability to persist and endure while bringing a library or application from prototype, to alpha, beta, 1.0 and beyond is a rare and hard earned skill. And yet, this is exactly the type of skill needed to tackle a problem in the calendar, task and note space.
• vector_spaces 5y ago
  Does anyone have any suggestions for how to sync multiple Google calendars (as in, across multiple google/gsuite accounts)? I have about 4 between work and school and consulting, and I'd like to see them all in one place rather than having to manually add events from the other calendars to a single master calendar. I figure this must be a solved problem, but I haven't found much about it.
  • Lightbody 5y ago
    Most calendar apps can display many calendars at once, overlaid on top of each other. But often a problem is that people in one organization can really only check the free/busy time for one of your calendars (the primary calendar associated with that org), and thus end up booking you when you're busy on one of those other calendars. I'm guessing this is the root problem you're getting at with your comment. Until the platforms themselves (ie: Office and Google) offer up a native way to indicate that multiple calendars represent your busy time, you're kinda stuck with this problem without employing a third party service. The good news is there is a solution to this problem -- my own startup[1] has a feature[2] that watches source calendars and creates blocks of time on a target calendar. It offers several different privacy options, such as making the block simply say "Personal Commitment" or "busy" or having it carry through all the event details (but not attendees because that would create a mess). [1] https://reclaim.ai/ https://reclaim.ai/ [2] https://reclaim.ai/features/calendar-sync https://reclaim.ai/features/calendar-sync
  • __mp 5y ago
    Fantastical (iOS/macOS) solves this use-case for me. It supports configuring different views (personal, work, etc...). Moving an event from one calendar to another calendar is also well-supported.
  • 12ian34 5y ago
    Just share your calendars with each other. I can't exactly remember the process but it works well, and you can choose to limit how much detail you share per cal
• willjp 5y ago
  Baikal is pretty nice as a cal-dav/card-dav server with a UI. I can sync it with gnome evolution, thunderbird, an iphone, and android (but required an app). I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m curious about caldavzap. A web calendar UI that syncs with caldav. There’s a neat tool called vdirsyncer that keeps a local offline copy of your contacts/calendars that works with it as well.
• janikvonrotz 5y ago
  I am using Nextcloud and Obsidian for my company. My collegues (with no background in IT) use Obsidian to work with projects, the knowledge base and personal note taking. They sync the Obsidian vault with Nextcloud. I use Nextcloud calendar to subscribe to many calendars (.ics). On my phone I've setup the CalDav connection to Nextcloud and all calenders even the subscribed are available. That is just amazing!
  • hammyhavoc 5y ago
    Does syncing Obsidian to Nextcloud mean you don't need a subscription to Obsidian? Haven't really dug into what they're offering.
    • janikvonrotz 5y ago
      Yes. Obsidian stores everything in plain text file and its config in the .obsidian folder. You can sync this folder to anywhere. Only problem that occurs occasionally is when two people work on the same file. This will result in sync conflict. Exception is if you work in the Nextcloud UI collaboratively, but Nextcloud does not support wiki links [[ ]] and uses its own linking format (appens file id to any link). I also git commit my personal vault and use working copy to sync with my phone. On my phone the Obsidian repo is synced with the local Obsidian app folder. This is more complicated to setup. But it works. Moreover my personal vault also contains git submodules. So I can stitch many Obsidian vaults into one (and make a big mess).
      • hammyhavoc 5y ago
        Wow! Thanks so much for this thoughtful response, really appreciate it. I know what I'll be trying tonight!
        • janikvonrotz 5y ago
          I had post pending regarding the mobile sync with Working Copy. You gave me a reason to finish it up: https://janikvonrotz.ch/2021/08/31/sync-obsidian-mobile-app-with-working-copy-git-repo/ https://janikvonrotz.ch/2021/08/31/sync-obsidian-mobile-app-...
• liotier 5y ago
  Radicale on the server, Thunderbird Calendar, Tasks & Cardbook on any desktop OS, Android contacts & calendar through DAVx5, tasks too... Simpler than this article makes it appear and has been working without as much as a hiccup for a very long time.
• beermonster 5y ago
  See here [1][2] for one possibility. The self-hostable community edition with z-push allows Calendar, Notes, Contacts via ActiveSync. [1] https://kopano.io/ https://kopano.io/ [2] https://www.linuxlinks.com/kopano-groupware-application-suite-zarafa/ https://www.linuxlinks.com/kopano-groupware-application-suit...
• MavropaliasG 5y ago
  As a power user, obsidian solved all of my problems and needs. It's amazing
• hihungryimdad 5y ago
  I'm in the process of doing a similar task, and I'm using my Synology DS418play for all of it. I wanted to roll my own server solution, but I just don't have time anymore. The simplicity of Synology is baffling, and it has been one of my most favorite purchases, ever. I was able to set up an SSL cert for my domain, a reverse proxy on the Synology NAS in a matter of minutes. This past month I've migrated my Evernote's to Synology Notes and lastpass to a bitwarden docker container running on the NAS. I'm planning on switching from Google Calendar to Synology Calendar in the next few weeks. I haven't looked in to it, so I wouldn't be surprised if Synology has rolled their own protocols for most of these applications. But they are well supported across Desktop (Mac/Linux/Windows) and their Phone applications work great. Again, might not be the solution you are looking for, but the ease and compatibility across various platforms might be worth the tradeoff.
• emiliosic 5y ago
  My takeaway is the author's complete disregard for PHP and other 'mature' languages.
• Too 5y ago
  > Conclusion: The open calendar, task and notes space is very fragmented 2 paragraphs further down... > How to fix this in the future: I myself intend to start working on a set of Rust libraries that implement these protocols History repeats itself.