Calendaring in the Modern Desktop

Between long and tedious RFCs, web-based alternatives, and non-compliant
proprietary apps, GNOME Calendar still stands as one of the best calendaring
apps out there - even when considering expensive proprietary alternatives.
There are many low and high level challenges in this problem space, but
specially over the past two years, significant improvements were made. Let's
learn about what are these challenges, what the milestones recently achieved,
the tricky usability, accessibility, and compliance challenges that the
calendaring domain has, and ideas for the future.


(c) GUADEC 2024
The GNOME Conference
Denver, US
July 19-24, 2024
https://events.gnome.org/event/209/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFs0KGpJlKk

1. Calendaring in the Modern Desktop
Georges Stavracas
Hari Rana
Jean-François (Jeff) Fortin Tam

2. Let’s talk about calendars
If you made it to this talk,
maybe GNOME Calendar works!

3. The Stack
(A big chunk of it rests on the shoulders of
one guy in Nebraska the Czech Republic)

4. The Stack ✨
∙Services: Evolution Data Server,
GNOME Online Accounts
∙Apps: Calendar, Evolution, GNOME Shell

5. What does Calendar
look like now?

7. Challenges
(other than making Jeff happy)

8. Long & Tedious RFCs
∙Hard to get right!
∙Excruciatingly boring details
∙168 + 133 + 21 + 7 + 23
= 352 pages of this stuff ??????

9. Calendaring is Political
∙Governments may act on a whim
∙Unpredictable
∙You can’t show maps to pick a timezone, for many reasons…
∙“How come Toronto is Canada’s eastern timezone, but Montréal is
not?!”
∙Not everybody starts their week on Sunday Monday
∙Unsure if the 1700-years-old international 7-days week standard will
hold

10. Proprietary Services
∙Looking at you, Google
∙Everyone collectively agreed to not care about the specs

11. Complex
Widgetry
∙Calendar with events on top
→ parenting issues
∙Infinitely scrolling view
→ 100% handmade
∙Still an open problem
(hello, Week view + Agenda
view)

12. Poor Accessibility
∙Currently almost non-existent
∙We don’t know what to do, really
RFC: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/issues/
1036
∙Hari experimenting with it, but still unsolved

13. Project Management
“What has Management
ever done for us anyway?”

14. The year is 2023. It is the future…
In a country far, far away…
Jeff had been hoping for a Google Calendar replacement
for 16 years…

15. Maximum headroom clearance: 300 tickets
Warning: you are now entering territory

18. Stats (after 1.5 years of triaging & bugfixing)
282 open issues, for now…
∙71 are requests for new features (25%)
∙70 are enhancement requests (25%)
∙101 are bugs (36%)
∙40 others (ex: depending on fixes elsewhere, or planning/overhead)
As strategic bugfixes happen, Jeff will keep mowing the lawn…
(yes, really)…Big opportunity for

19. Roadmap
a.k.a. issue #965

20. Accessibility
∙Of course, it’s important
∙Again, we don’t know what to do
∙We’re looking for funds for this

21. Timezones: How Hard Can It Be?™
Calendar tolerates timezones; cannot change event timezones

22. Invites: How Hard Can It Be?™
Reply Yes/No/Maybe to incoming events,
or, conversely, invite others & get responses

23. Tighter RFCs
∙Responsible, spec-compliant citizens
∙Hard, but achievable
∙Please help grow our unit tests suite!
(see issue #1093 for example)

24. Portal (?)
∙Common interface for desktop environments to integrate calendaring
(hello, chat clients and email clients other than Evolution)
∙Probably there won’t ever be consensus on it

25. New Backend (?)
∙Evolution-data-server served us well, but has shortcomings
∙Probably needs an entirely new calendaring backend for GNOME
∙Very difficult, complicated, and laborious, for questionable gains
(Georges makes kitty Jeff scared)
∙Idea:
TinySPARQL for data storage & modeling
A new system service for aggregation and queries

26. Funding the Project
∙Request for funding from the GNOME Foundation, NLnet, Warren
Buffett…
(https://nlnet.nl/foundation/network.html)
∙Accessibility
∙Timezones

27. Q&A

28. Thank You!