I’ve become a big fan of iCal on the Mac. iCal has got a the fine balance of features vs. simplicity about right, so suddenly my life is colour coded.
I’ve got 9 calendars in it (hence the colour coding). Personal stuff, Birthdays (linked to the Address Book), Coursework tasks and deadlines, Lecture schedules, University events, Work, Gigs, integration with Backpack and finally Television.
I’m terrible at remembering to watch TV. I get deeply into reading miscellany on the internet that the time just passes by. So I’ve started adding the schedules into iCal. OK, that’s schedule singular, since the only programme I care enough to watch at the moment is Danny Wallace’s fantastic How to start your own country.
Now (to the point), the thought occurs that this system would be far better if the BBC, Radio Times or someone has a service whereby I could browse the TV listings for all the channels I have access too, tick a check-box next to the programmes I want to watch and then have it generate an iCalendar to subscribe to in iCal. Voil, TV listings synchronised with iCal. This will then implicitly synchronise with my phone and someday a neural implant (probably called the iMind or following the current Apple love of super-heroes: Pinky).
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.