Agendus for iPhone: interview with iambic
Agendus is heading to the iPhone imminently and one area that has raised discussion is the lack of calendar functionality in the first version. We caught up with Adriano from iambic to find out why…
1/ Agendus has become a way of life for many Palm OS and Windows Mobile users and some seem upset that calendar functionality is not in the first version. Why is it missing?
I totally understand those Agendus users out there who, when hearing version 1.0 of the iPhone flavour has no calendar integration, feel disappointed. Sadly enough, so far Apple doesn’t allow any third party app to access the calendar. Essentially the iPhone SDK doesn’t provide functions allowing developers to tie into calendar related data. Why is this? Unclear at the moment, but on the other hand there are some APIs allowing access to contact info, which we are fully taking advantage of, and these allow us to integrate contacts.
Unfortunately things don’t appear to change much even in version 3 of the SDK, or at least in the latest beta version we have, there still is no Calendar related API.
2/ How do you view adding synchronisation with Google Calendar as a stop gap measure?
We considered going for the route of implementing our own calendar storage and syncing it with online services, such as Google Calendar, but that just didn’t seem ideal. More often than not the user would end up with some appointments in one calendar (the native iPhone Calendar) and some other appointments in Agendus.
Exchange users would keep getting their appointments in the native calendar, same applies for users of other online calendars supporting the Exchange ActiveSync protocol, such as the recently released Google Sync for iPhone (not sure how things would play out if getting the native calendar populated through Google Sync, and then Agendus syncing with Google Calendar as well).
3/ Will calendar functionality be included when Apple opens the iPhone restrictions up?
Absolutely, in fact we are already working on a framework for native calendar support in order to get the calendaring support into Agendus as soon as we are able to access the native storages. We are also researching alternate ways of getting to the native calendar storages, without going for the jailbroken option.
4/ What’s the ultimate goal for Agendus for iPhone?
It very much is the same of all our other flavours of Agendus – to become an all-in-one personal information manager for organizing and tracking the essentials that drive our daily lives. I know this might sound like a tall goal, but ultimately it’s what we strive to accomplish with all of our flavours of Agendus across the various OSes. Version 1.0 might still be far from reaching such a goal, but as it happened for all our other versions of Agendus, we plan to improve, integrate, and adapt the application through ongoing updates while constantly listening to users’ feedback.
With out the calender functionality its just window dressing. I’m still holding back on getting an iphone.
Importing of existing contact and calender data from a palm environment is as critical to meet my needs.
[...] Agendus for iPhone: interview with iambic | PDA-247 I totally understand those Agendus users out there who, when hearing version 1.0 of the iPhone flavour has no calendar integration, feel disappointed. Sadly enough, so far Apple doesn’t allow any third party app to access the calendar. Essentially the iPhone SDK doesn’t provide functions allowing developers to tie into calendar related data. Why is this? Unclear at the moment, but on the other hand there are some APIs allowing access to contact info, which we are fully taking advantage of, and these allow us to integrate contacts.Unfortunately things don’t appear to change much even in version 3 of the SDK, or at least in the latest beta version we have, there still is no Calendar related API. [...]
Wish I’d read the article first.
Loved Agendus on my Palm, but without Calendar there’s nothing there that’s worth the money I paid.
I’ve got address book, weather bug, bento…
If my previous experience with Iambic is the same – they’ll charge for upgrades (that should have been here in the first place. They should offer it free for this version.
Also, the quote & relevant date throw errors and don’t work – even though I don’t want this.
I’d wait for the next version.
When I saw agendus was up, I was as happy as I child on Halloween. I got it, installed it and regreted it immediately. All in all it is a poor app, losing in functionality to all of the other constact and task alternatives out there. The task system is pretty basic, weather is poor and that´s it. The rest is not even worth mentioning. After a few minutes of exploring, I deleted it from my iphone. Too bad, since losing Agendus and DocstoGo were the worst things about leaving a decade of being a Palm user behind. At least the new DocstoGo, even though still in development, looks great.
As a scientist who has thousands of contacts, based on sets of professional and personal categories, I need a contact list which can be grouped or selected, based on my selections. Agendus for the iPhone doesn’t appear to have this contact categorizing, only for Tasks. I want to also be able to search for people based upon their city, area code, etc., as well as string search through my contacts for critical information. Does Agendus do any of these?
Above all, I want a hotsync desktop application for my Mac from which I can see and edit all the iPhone information. Of course, the calendar, the calendar, the calendar.
[...] Agendus voor de iPod is een uitgeklede versie van wat we voor de Palm kennen, dus onbruikbaar.. Agendus for iPhone: interview with iambic | PDA-247 Zodra er een goede iPod-Agendus is stap ik [...]
Excerpts from minutes at an Apple board meeting:
“We had considered improving the iPhone for the business community with improvements such as complete third party access to its calendar data, however, we prefer to sell fewer iPhones. We have a problems with making more money and prefer to keep Apple products out of the hands of too many business people. It might ruin our image if iPhones or MacBooks started showing up in the business world.
Instead, we will continue to limit functionality of Apple products for the business world, particularly the iPhone. We like walking into a business office and seeing PC’s on every business person’s desk except for the lone Mac computer in the graphi designer’s office. The same for the iPhone. We need to continue to help Blackberry’s and Palm Phones remain the favorite of business people. iPhones are meant for teens and freaks and that will not change.”
Leave your response!
Categories
PDair
Pipe Tool
Farkle
Fruit Salad
Piel Frama
Smart Box Design
Mastersoft
Clove Technology
User
Twitter
Archives
Tags
Recent Comments
Most Commented
recent posts