Dates Article

["Lucas Rocha" <lucasr at mundo gmail com>]

Hi all,

Here is the Dates article by Chris Lord. I really like the article but
I think it needs some more info about Dates basic features with
screenshots. What do you think?

--lucasr

A Guide to Getting Dates

What is Dates?

Despite what it's name might suggest, Dates (http://projects.o-hand.com/dates) is neither a tribute to dried fruit, nor some sort of match-making application; instead, it is a calendar/organiser application aimed at being fast, simple to use and easily recognisable.

This last goal is partly accomplished by Dates's unique zooming view: Rather than having distinctive day/week/month/year views that may differ in their representation of events, Dates has a single view that can scale to accommodate any range of time. No distinction is made between any zoom level, so unlike more traditional electronic calendar representations, the interface remains the same at all times.

<Screenshot: http://projects.o-hand.com/_media/dates1.png>

Dates is primarily written by Chris Lord, with most of the Maemo port written by Tomas Frydrych, under the direction of Matthew Allum and OpenedHand (http://www.openedhand.com/) as a whole. Check out http://projects.o-hand.com/ for more cool Embedded Linux projects.


What is Dates not?

Dates is not a replacement for Evolution. Although Dates is developed on the desktop and the desktop is kept in mind, its primary target is the Nokia 770 and other hand-held devices. Dates will probably never have as many features as Evolution or Outlook, however, the features it shares with such suites will hopefully be faster and more easily accessible. This said, Dates currently consists of a fairly minimal application interface and a calendar widget, which does the brunt of the work - of course, hackers are always welcome to use the widget in more desktop-oriented projects!


The Future

Although Dates is not an Evolution replacement, that doesn't mean that it might not be more suited for day-to-day desktop use. It would be nice to see an alternative to Evolution in Gnome involving smaller, separate, but tightly-integrated applications. If need be, these could easily be wound together using application embedding, as shown in this experiment (http://chrislord.net/blog/Software/just-for-fun.essay).

<Screenshot: http://chrislord.net/images/launchpad.png>

In the more immediate future, the next version of Dates should support recurring events, alarms, ical import, calendar editing, clipboard operations, categories, and already features drag-and-drop in Subversion (as well as the usual array of minor improvements and bug-fixes). Earlier versions of Dates features animated transitions between zoom levels. This has since been removed due to glitches, but may be reinstated at a later date when the application has stabilised in other areas.


Where can I get it?

Dates is available in Debian unstable, or if you use Ubuntu dapper, visit http://debian.o-hand.com/ for repository details. If you're not running a Debian-based distribution, the source code for the latest release can be downloaded from http://projects.o-hand.com/sources/dates/dates-0.1.tar.gz. Dates is also available for the Nokia 770; details to enter into the Application Manager can be found at http://maemo.o-hand.com/ (Note that the slash after 'mistral' is important and that the 'Components' field should be left empty).