In case you hadn't seen it (which I assume you have), Backpack now sports a shiny new calendar for organizing your life. Available for pay accounts only (it's a measly $5 bucks for a basic account), the reviews seem pretty positive so far, even though I haven't tried it yet. Personally if it's less heavy and AJAX'd than Google's implementation, I might be suaded to dish out some moola.

I mean, with Hiker on its way and voicemail for Backpack pages, why wouldn't I try it?

Well... (and I respectfully disagree with Jason that iCal export is sufficient) hCalendar and hCard support would be a pretty sweet addition. But, as he correctly points out, I'm not really his target audience. Phooey. It's such a drag when folks are adament about not doing what the early adopters demand. It's like they have, I dunno, backbone or something.

💬 Comments from the original post

Josh Peek · 2006-07-27 19:39:01

"I mean, with Hiker on its way and voicemail for Backpack pages, why wouldnâ€™t I try it?" I got to get back working on that thing. Well, its open source, so if anyone wants keys to the source code, I'll hand them over. Thinking of moving it over to the new google code thing.

Chris Casciano · 2006-07-28 04:32:31

Wellâ€¦ (and I respectfully disagree with Jason that iCal export is sufficient) hCalendar and hCard support would be a pretty sweet addition. But, as he correctly points out, Iâ€™m not really his target audience.

That a nothing but a lazy excuse if i've ever heard one out of them... its just f'n markup! It doesn't have to change your feature set, or your look at all to implement. Using proper classes on the people page in their little table+class blocks to turn them into hcards has nothing to do with audience or too many geek features or making it not a simple app anymore or giving in to the request of the few... its just f'n markup. Same goes for hCalendar and some of the pages where it would be most useful (like milestones) the content is there.. the markup tags are almost all there.. its just taking the time to look it over and massage it. *grumbles and goes off to find some coffee*

Chris Messina · 2006-07-28 07:11:42

Heya Chris, while I'd like to agree with you, I think that the appropriate response is to patch Rails and get it to do the right thing in the case of Event, People and similar views. I do think that it's too bad that 37Signals isn't into supporting microformats and taking a leadership role in pushing them forward (nor OpenID, which I also pushed Jason on), but his take is essentially that 1) there's little benefit to his customers 2) the interfaces and consuming tools simply aren't there to make a business case to expend the effort to make it happen. I think that this will be a common argument, so it's true, until the browser natively supports hCalendar (over iCal, since Backpack does export that, minus VTODO), there's little to incent them to implement it, regardless of how easy it is. :(