by Telstar Logistics

Why hasn’t someone created a good online calendar^*? It’s one of those tasks that seems easy but has proven to be crazy complicated.

I use Google Calendar and I find it highly irritating. It would be fine if I only had one calendar, or maybe two. It seems like Google Calendar is designed with the organizing principle being the calendar. If you want to create multiple calendars to represent different kinds of time commitments, each one is created and organized on it’s own. You can insert views of some calendars into others, but they’re only loosely integrated.

Why isn’t the organizing principle of these applications me and my time?

Why can’t I keep a single view of my time commitments and see separate personal and work calendars simultaneously without importing each into the other? Why can’t I give someone (say my fiancé) the ability to modify one but not all of my calendars but still be able to see my other time commitments (even if they’re only shown as busy time) without her having to import my calendars into her own?

I’ve gotten Google Calendar to do some of these things, but it seems to take a lot more effort than it should, often requiring obscure or odd hacks and settings. An example: recently I tried to allow someone to make appointments for me on a work calendar. However, for that person to see all of my other time commitments they would need to import all of my separate calendars (I have quite a few) into theirs to be able to see them. There was no way for them to (easily) see a unified view of all my time with permission to see only the details of one of my calendars. There was no way for me to provide a view or interface to them without them importing it all into yet another calendar.

These things are complicated if your basic unit of organization is the calendar, but if it’s the person, (it seems to me) they might be easier to implement and visualize. I imagine the organizing principle being “views” of my time, where I could configure different people to have different views (work people see work schedule but not personal, and vice versa).

I think an interesting project would be to create an abstraction layer for Google Calendar that presents this kind of view. You would point your “time view” to all of your separate calendars and it would act as an aggregator. You could publish different versions of this aggregate view with different editing privileges. You could even do things like “layer” different people’s time views on top of each other to see free / busy time. Maybe I’ll play with this idea as a (yet another) side project but probably not, awfully busy these days with Smarterer.

SnapMyInfo now has a simple page to allow you to generate QR codes to experiment with. There seems to be growing interest in these kinds of two dimensional barcodes, so I thought it would be fun to allow you to generate barcodes based on arbitrary text and not just snap codes.

This isn’t the internal SnapMyInfo Barcode generator. While surfacing the internal barcode generator used by SnapMyInfo wouldn’t have been too hard, I often tweak the generator and didn’t want people to have to depend on this external service if I ever decided to modify the barcode output in any way. While poking around the Google Charts API a few months back, I noticed they now have support for generating QR codes. This page is basically a simple front end for generating QR codes using Google’s service. Simply input any text you want (up to 512 characters) and you’ll get a barcode image in return. These barcodes contain text but by using certain text patterns you can tell some barcode readers to do special things with them.

Barcodes as Physical Links

If you create a barcode comprised solely of a URL, including the ‘http://’ like http://snapmyinfo.com/ many barcode readers are designed to interpret the barcode as a link. That means they will, if a web browser is available, automatically take you to the site contained in the barcode.

Telephone numbers

Starting the text with the prefix TEL: instructs the barcode reader that this is a phone number. In many cases a smartphone will dial the number contained in the barcode when it is decoded.

Automatic Email

You can embed an automatic email message in a QR barcode. I’ve found this to be relatively uncommon, but the pattern is SMTP:[email address]:[subject]:[message]. Some barcode readers treat this pattern in a similar way to the ‘mailto’ url protocol in web browsers, creating an email in the smartphone’s email application ready to send.

Example: SMTP:support@snapmyinfo.com:Hello:Greetings to SnapMyInfo

Automatic SMS

SMSTO:7812189522:Greetings to SnapMyInfo!

This one also isn’t as common, but you can create a barcode with the following pattern: SMSTO:[cell number]:[message].

For example, the barcode to the right sends an SMS to TenZeroLab. If your smartphone’s barcode reader understands SMSTO then the barcode will automatically create a text message.

vCard

The barcode can contain a “vcard” as well. vCards are a standard format that’s often used for sharing contact information. This isn’t something you’d typically type directly into a barcode generator, but it does work. A typical vcard in a barcode might look like the following:

BEGIN:VCARD
FN:SnapMyInfo
N:;;;;
ORG:SnapMyInfo
EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET;TYPE=WORK:support@snapmyinfo.com
END:VCARD

Boston Massachusettes!

Sometimes the vcard standard is also used to embed geographic coordinates in the QR code as well. The pattern looks the same except that a GEO: heading is included with latitude and longitude values.

BEGIN:VCARD
N:;Boston, MA
GEO:-71.059773;42.358431
END:VCARD

Others

There are a few other text patterns that are interpreted by various barcode readers not included in the above list, but these seem to be the most common.

I’m curious how people will experiment with this and what fun and interesting uses people will find.

Recently I’ve been playing with our stream output and messing with different publishing models, like injecting it into blog posts directly. These were mostly just experiments to get a feel for different ways of displaying Grazr content aside from our traditional “super-widget” view.

I stumbled across this service feedvolley that basically takes feeds and turns them into nicely formatted web pages (most of the themes are modeled after Tumblr). This isn’t something that’s hard to do with code, but feedvolley makes it quick and easy to play around with generating sites, and the addition of themes is nice. Here’s my “Apple News” stream in feedvolley.

It may seem counterintuitive to turn feeds into pages, but feeds can be difficult for people to understand and pages are an accessible type of content for most. It becomes especially interesting when you think of processed or filtered feeds, feeds that have no direct analog back to a particular web page. A clear example would be our streams, the amalgamation of lots of different sources.

It’s interesting to get a feel for what these new pages are like. They are something new with different purpose than their original sources.

I know Twitter’s been having problems, but lately we’ve been hoping to build some twitter services. Unfortunately due to their issues, we’ve been denied access to the twitter jabber stream we were hoping to build on. In the interim I’ve been playing with Summize, it’s a pretty nice search engine for Twitter. They return data in a few formats, so I’m playing with their JSON return seeing what I can get out of it. Here’s showing a search for various political terms including the DNC, Obama, Hilary, McCain and a few others.

Temporarily disabled.

It’s nice to have a new blog where I can throw together little experiments. I just changed my stream integrator around a bit so I thought I’d test it again. One of my streams is “Apple News”, so this list should be an up to the hour river-of-news, updated from my favorite Apple news sources.

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We’ve tried focusing on our feed streams lately at Grazr (it’s the main focus of our homepage) and at the same time we’ve been playing with some alternate publishing / integration methods. This list of links should dynamically update as the sources in our a-list stream mention twitter along with scaling. Here’s what the A-list is saying:

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