[Remind-Fans] Why use remind over Google Calendar?

[Paul Hinze]

I figured this discussion was worth its own thread, and as far as I can
tell this hasn't been treated before on the list.  (Feel free to stop me
if it has.)

David Kritzberg <david.kritzberg at colorado.edu> on 2007-05-28 at 03:24:
> Can I ask why you are switching from Google Calendar to remind?  Has
> this come up before on the list?  I use remind, but recently I needed
> to share a calendar with someone I was working with, and Google
> Calendar seems pretty useful, especially in a collaborative
> environment.  I don't use a Mac so maybe there is something I am
> missing out on here.  I would be curious to hear other people's
> opinions on the tradeoffs with using remind.  Aside from privacy
> advantage over a "free" service like Google, by keeping your data on
> your own system, and aside from having really good precision with
> respect to figuring out when events occur the way remind does, why use
> remind? 

David,

I am a recent convert from Google Calendar to remind, and so I'd be
happy to share my thoughts on it and I'd also be interested in what
other people have to say.

First of all, I think the three things that you mention in your "aside
from" clause (privacy, data ownership, date-calculation) cannot be cast
aside as trivial; are all crucial reasons for wanting to switch to
remind.

For me, it was another step towards the "unix lifestyle", a process I've
been working on for the past year or two.  I would like to be able to
manage my life in plain text using all Free Software.  I also want to
minimize my need to use the mouse.  I switched from GMail to mutt for my
MUA.  Virtual desktops and keyboard shortcuts got me away from shuffling
around windows all the time.  And once I stumbled across remind through
Paul Pelzl's Wyrd and I read his subtitle ("Because you're tired of
waiting for your bloated calendar program to start up."), I knew that I
was going to seriously consider this for my calendaring needs.  Remind
is a good unix tool in that it follows the philosophy of "do one thing
well."  It handles the reminders and only the reminders, the rest it
leaves up to the user.

The advantages of switching from GCal to remind for me fall into a
couple of categories.

Productivity:

I never have to leave the terminal to check my day's schedule or to
put an appointment on my calendar (the latter of which is even easier
now thanks to Wyrd 1.4.2).

Platform Independence/Integration:

Because remind is essentially platform agnostic I can integrate my
calendaring program with my system and the way I work.  I now get my
reminders however I want them, and don't have to depend on another
company to develop new features.  As I'm currently on OS X, I have my
schedule listed on the desktop with GeekTool and alerts of reminders pop
up with Growl.  When I switch to Linux, I can switch to gxmessage and
some other desktop display program.

Now, true, you could say that GCal is platform independent, too.  But
what I like about remind is that you can shape *it* to your platform's
specifics, instead of sticking some GUI in the middle of your
environment.

Interoperability:

Because remind works in plain text, it is easy to convert it to whatever
format you may need it in.  If I decide to publish a public iCal file to
my site, I can grab rem2ics and away I go.  It's also future proof: if any
future technology comes along that has a new calendar format I know I
will be able to convert my data to whatever I need.

Automation:

Anything I can do with cron can integrate with my calendar.  I can have
a reminder inserted to "clean out hard drive" when my disk space usage
is too high.  I can keep my reminders synced across all of the machines
I work on automatically.  I can have e-mails sent based on a reminder to
everyone I have invited to a meeting.

Possibilities:

If I wanted to hear Tetris music that got faster as my next reminder got
closer, I could do that. ;)

So with all of the "I could" and "if I wanted to" statements above, I
think "possibilities" would be the best way to sum up why I switched
from GCal to remind.

Best wishes,

Paul