Custom Calendar actions
 

I have been thinking about starting a dev project semiseriously. Something that all mobile platforms are presently missing IMHO is decent scheduling agent. Might sound weird, there are all kinds of applications for that. What I would want to see is Calendar (and hence, Exchange) integration.

Using a scheduling agent like Alarmed is OK for system tasks runned periodically, and it can deliver custom action. But I put personal tasks always into the calendar. Then the damn 10 minute alarm (that I forget turn off) always goes on regardless of whether it has any relevance, not all calendar entries are typical appointments. Here are some examples of what custom action might be:
1) Use speech API to voice me that "Task XXX is due to begin in five minutes".
2) Activate silent profile for the meeting.
3) Wake me up with some music, tell me what day it is and read headlines from an RSS feed (and make me some breakfast, of course).
4) Control an external device, for example remote power switch.
5) Turn on the radio for an interesting program.

One would obviously have to put some keywords into the Notes field that would represent the action. The major turn-off is that custom scheduling agent will need to run in background waiting for events while the proprietary Calendar agent is doing exactly the same thing. I don't even know whether there is an easy way to access the event list. Any ideas? This could be something to work on in the Maemo5 Community releases, especially if Nokia would eventually open Maemo5 application source codes.

Re: Custom Calendar actions
 

This sounds nice. The calendar is currently the worst part of the Maemo5 UX and your scheduling agent could improve it significantly.

(The best thing would of course be that Nokia released the calendar source but I am certain that it will never happen.)

Re: Custom Calendar actions
 

Let me help with some ideas based on having an application used for years as spectacular as DateBK (hhttp: / / www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6.htm).

Allow them to stop recurring appointments choose each number of weeks / months that repeats, which days of the week are repeated and for changing a meeting of a specific day and time without losing the whole chain of related appointments. For example: I have classes every Friday at 18pm but the fourth Friday suspends and changes the Thursday of that week at 19pm. Separate this appointment should be allowed without affecting the appointment repetitiba all Fridays at 18pm.

Also:

Allowing repetition task management in time, percent complete this task and when to begin and
finish.

Allow to associate tasks and notes to appointments on the calendar.

Add support to include access to documents, images, etc ... both calendar appointments and tasks and notes.

Do not forget to support keyboard shortcuts.

Thanks.

Re: Custom Calendar actions
 

Would it be possible to hijack the alarm?
Does the calendar send some signal to the os to start that damn appointmentbeep that can be redefined?

Re: Custom Calendar actions
 

What I hate in the default calendar is that

you can set the the events only at prefixed times, I mean every 5 minutes, at ex. at 10.15, at 10.20 etc,

than you can set the alarm 5 min before, 15 min before etc.

and at least repeating every day, week, month or year.

This may be good, because you don't always input manually the numbers 1+5 at ex. for 15 min, but sometime i want more personalisation like

event at 10.28 exact, alarm at 10.27 exact and repeat every two weeks at ex.

Re: Custom Calendar actions
 

@electroaudio,

Unfortunately I (still) don't know so much about Maemo, but if your idea would work it would be quite great.

No need to tweak the calendar, just use as normal and set alarms for the events you like. Then your event-sniffer kicks in and decides if your event gets a special treatment or passes it to the standard alarm handler.

Gee, if I had the time I would even do it myself! :)

Re: Custom Calendar actions
 

Well, you probably know more than me ;) but i think i read somewhere that the alarm will work even when the phone is off.
If so, it has to be an hardwareinterrupt or something like that, that has to be redefined...
-And if so, i guess the kernelguys knows exactly where to look for it :)

Re: Custom Calendar actions
 

Hijacking the alarm would be really something, but I would not bet that
1) there is a hardware interrupt involved
2) hijacking would be practical even if it existed
ps -ax shows that bin/calendar is running in background, it would probably be sufficient to modify and recompile it to perform custom actions. But with present open source policy this all seems rather theoretical.