Locale + Calendar Integration, Take 2

Carter from Locale team made a correction to the original post.

First of all, my apologies - I've had a tunnel vision attack and didn't see the calendar icon on the screenshot.

On the other hand, that might serve as a message that screenshots are insufficient, and they're not searchable. And that the documentation is an important part of your product - even if it is free. For now. And the front page of the project is still talking about Android release in the future tense.

But enough bickering, let me address the original point.

I guess I was thinking about Calendar integration for too long and didn't realize that what I implied too much in a cryptic message, so let me spell it out.

Let's see, yes, you can integrate a Calendar event into Locale. However, in order to do that, you need to:

1. Get the phone in your hands;
2. Open Locale;
3. Fiddle with it for a sufficiently long period of time in order to create a situation;
4. Go through the user interface that duplicates Calendar (I didn't look into technicalities, hope Calendar UI is a standard Android gadget);
5. Select the event;
6. Finish the situation.

That's a lot of work.

Now, what I actually meant was:

1. Start creating your event (in the Calendar);
2. Add a Calendar gadget that specifies notification preferences to your event;
3. Have Locale (or suchlike application) analyze the events in background and apply settings that are already specified in the events.
   

And that's all.

The point is, don't do the job you don't have to. Lazy design is a good design.

Note, it doesn't matter whether the event is being created via Web interface on your computer, or your phone. Don't know about you, but I hate the small keyboards on smartphones, no matter how good they are - maybe it's all cool and peachy while you still have all your life ahead of you, but well, I have better things to do than explore the limits of G1's mechanical excellence (more about that in a different post) in my not-so-spare time.

Having said all that, let me repeat once more that yes, I realize that per-event calendar gadget may not even exist yet (last time I checked, it didn't), but that can be addressed, and I'm sure it's either there already, or is coming soon.

More about lazy design - ahem... Give me one good reason why do you have to have a separate "manage" tab, whereas you can do the same thing in the same tab by simply using a long press?

But again, I'm nitpicking. All in all, Locale is a very useful application, and if the design team plays along with Google's way of doing things (release early, release often, improve evolutionarily) - I'm sure it'll keep being one of Android's crown jevels.

Good job, guys, and good luck.

Four R Mantra, now coming to Android

It used to be called The Microsoft Mantra: Four R's.

Retry,
Reboot,
Reinstall,
Repeat.

My Nokia never needed a reboot.

I was appalled when I was told by customer service to reboot my PEBL.

I wasn't even surprised when BlackBerry wanted to reboot after installing practically anything, and sometimes even by itself, for a good measure.

I guess I have nobody but myself to blame that I didn't figure out that a simple reboot would fix the problems I was having lately. But no, it didn't occur to me, I've put too much faith in the development team, and it took a call to T-Mobile customer service (hilarious call, I should say) to cure that.

All right, now that I know that Four R's is applicable to Android, my life is easier.

It's still disgusting, though. Thought they would do better than that.

Oops

Last thing in the world that you want to do is to get the geeks pissed.

The very last thing in the world that you want to do is to get the law geeks pissed.

Viva Harvard.

When The Geek Phone Is Assaulted By Mere Mortals...

...then the infrastructure caves in. *And* the geek phone.

I guess the audience is catching up, and the regular users that bought the phone not because they knew what it is, but because they saw the ad or otherwise chose it over something else, finally discovered the Android Market.

Application downloads started since yesterday still display "starting download" (tricks with "restarting" don't help), and the whole phone feels as sluggish as 256M RAM computer trying to run ten applications under Windows XP. There's seven application download processes runnig in parallel, with zero success.

I guess I could've eased its task and cancel some of downloads to bring the phone back to normal, but that'd be cheating - regular users won't do that, so I'm gonna follow their lead and see how soon does it come back to normal, if ever.

That's a second serious dent in G1, first being the voice dialer.

Update: Don't know what was the role of the Market server, but 24 hours later the issue was solved by a simple reboot. Welcome to the Windows world.