As many of you know, I’m a big believer in the concept of software-as-a-service (see here or here), web applications, call them what you will. My natural affinity for such applications (honed as a systems integrator) has only become more pronounced as the technologies now commonly referred to as Ajax have reset expectations as to what software as a service can do.
Thus it was with interest that I opened a beta account with the new service Trumba (which I was alerted to via Alex Bosworth). Like Alex and David Ascher, I’m finding the service reasonably impressive UI-wise, and well thought out in terms of its design.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to merit much more of a look from me until I can successfully import two things: my Evolution iCal file (I get the following error “iCalendar file contains unsupported VTimeZone property RRULE”) and my Upcoming.org iCal file (not that there’s much in it – it’s more the principle). Speaking of Upcoming.org, it would be great if Trumba offered the ability to work with other online resources; near as I can determine you can’t feed it a URL, it has to be a locally available file.
I will give Trumba big points for its handling of timezones, however – an ability that’s now of critical importancce to me. Handling time changes in predictable fashion has been a traditional weakness of PIM clients (I’ve had horrible experiences with Outlook in the past, and the best I can do in Evolution apparently is this), but Trumba simply and automatically shifted my appointment depending on the timezone I selected.
One of the reasons I think applications like Trumba are important is that I think calendar applications are an area with a lot of potential in the near term.
a.) There’s been essentially zero innovation in them in recent years,
b.) We’ve all got complicated schedules and
c.) Most of would like some mobile integration (cell phone at a minimum)
What we need is a way to maintain them easily (I probably spend an hour a day trying to schedule various conversations), and share them in granular fashion. With services like Upcoming or EVDB introducing iCal like concepts more widely, I expect to see increasing demand for more sophisticated calendaring applications in the near term. Maybe Trumba will be one them, or maybe it will be Google Calendar. Either way, the next generation calendar applications can’t get here soon enough.
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