I am pretty excited about the prospect of iCalendars becoming widely adopted. I hope this begins happens over the next year or so. The ability to subscribe to group calendars and not have to maintain them (or maintain them and not have to hope everyone else keeps up) is great. More centralized data is good. As mentioned a few days back, I’m using the iCalendar format for my tasks app and in general I’m very pleased.

I like PHP iCalendar, but in my opinion, it lacks a number of basic usability features. Not everyone agrees with me on this – I guess different people have their own versions of bloat vs. usability. For me, having to open a little window just to identify an item on my calendar is a bit ridiculous. From what I understand from their license, I can make changes as I see fit and distribute them as long as they are commented as such. I’ve done this to add tooltips on the demo. Very annoying, there wasn’t a function or method I could edit, I had to go change it in 6 different places.

However, it is much nicer to be able to just mouseover an item and see the full title – at least to me. I’ll include a version of PHP iCalendar with these changes in the 1.0 release. I may try to add support for the URL property as well. Right now I’m setting it so from the iCalendar you could follow a link back to tasks to edit an item there, but the link isn’t shown in the iCalendar’s output.