Calendar:Search Engines
There is currently a fairly wide array of calendar data publicly available, which may be of interest to users of Sunbird and Lightning. This data comes from various sources such as icalshare.com, evdb.com, and google calendar. However, it's not always easy for users to find the data they are looking for, nor is there an easy workflow from finding a calendar online to adding the calendar to Sunbird or Lightning's subscription list. Accordingly, this proposal discusses a possible set of calendar search engines, allowing for easy access to the desired data by users.
The New Calendar wizard would be modified, on "page 2" to look more like:
|---------------------------------------------------------------| | | | Enter url: [_______________________________________________] | | or | | Search a known calendar database [Mv Mozilla.com holidays ] | | |E EVDB.com | | | Results: |I iCalShare.com | | | |--------------------------------|G Google Calendar | | | | Name | URL |-------------------------| | | | U.S. Holidays | http://www.mozilla.org/projects/... | | | | U.K. Holidays | http://www.mozilla.org/projects/... | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-------------------------------------------------------| | | | | | | | | | |---------------------------------------------------------------| | [ Cancel ] [ Back ] [ Next ] | |---------------------------------------------------------------|
(This assumes that calendar-type autodetection has been solved.)
The search box would work identically to the Firefox search box.
This ought to raise awareness about sharing calendars, further helping to increase calendar sharing, perhaps through iTIP/iMIP. It also would allow for more useful calendaring, as less information would needed to be entered by hand. Furthermore, it begins to solve the auto-holiday subscription problem. It also provides modest advertising for small-business, who may wish to share their calendars through one of these services. All are significant benefits to the user.
