the personal blog of john montgomery

It may seem as though I’m calendar-obsessed, but frankly it’s a critical part of what we do in the collaborative workflow of fxguide and fxphd. In the Chicago offices, we have several calendars which we use to track production, term needs, and even my (insane) travel schedule.

I also love apps that are cleanly and simply designed — they look great and just work.

Put these two things together and I’ve come to rely on an app called Fantastical, which places a calendar icon on your menu bar. By clicking on this icon, you can see at a glance what you have planned for the day (or the next week by scrolling down). It’s nicely presented and always there to refer to.

But the real killer feature imho is the ability to quickly enter appointments in a human readable form. In the example to the right, I’ve simply written:

record fxphdod on monday at 5pm

And it correctly enters the event into my calendar. It’s not perfect, but it works extraordinarily well most of the time.

iCloud is still very much in beta, experiencing the loss of several useful features from MobileMe when making the transition to the new platform. A huge shortcoming of Apple’s calendar functionality is that if the person you want to share a calendar with doesn’t have iCloud, you can only share it read only.

The fxguide/fxphd crew is OSX-centric, but sharing outside the company becomes problematic. So I’ve shifted the hub of my “calendaring” to Google Calendar. This does involve a bit more setup than the pure Apple one, but the extra hassle is worth it…once you find the real instructions on how to make it work
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C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

From the New York Times.

It was an old-fashioned butt kicking that the Democrats received in the midterms this week. And it was certainly a reflection of the tough economic times in our country. But there’s an interesting article in the Washington Monthly which points out that the loss of seats in midterms is certainly not something unusual.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_11/026452.php