Calendar now available for beta testing

[neilj]

We're very excited to have just released the web UI for our new calendar on to our beta server for public testing. CalDAV access for native clients is also now in beta, and we hope to make a final production release in March.

To access, simply log in to your FastMail account at https://beta.fastmail.fm and select "Calendar" from the menu in the top left.

Please note, the calendar is not available to Guest/Member accounts (at the moment, the link is shown but events will not save; we will improve the UI here to make it clear the calendar is not available to these service levels).

IMPORTANT. Known issues:

• Email reminders do not work yet (you will not be sent an email).
• Emails are not yet sent out to people invited to an event.
• An email is not currently sent when you respond to an invitation in the calendar view.
• Integration with the mail part of our web UI (save attached event to calendar etc.) is not quite working yet, and the date shown on invitations is wrong (always today's date).

Other features we're working on:

• Support for files attached to events.
• Support for calendar sharing between users in a family/business
• Support for subscribing to public iCal files and showing them in your calendar.
• An easy way to import/export calendar data.
• Push updates when changes made elsewhere

A few tips and tricks:

• Open the settings and select the new Calendar panel to enable a few advanced features, create new calendars and make sure your time zone is set correctly
• You can drag and drop events to move them (or hold down alt whilst dragging to copy).
• There are keyboard shortcuts for navigating (try j/k, or hit g), and also for the buttons in the action bar at the top (hover over the button to get a tooltip with the shortcut).

Please post bug reports, feature suggestions or other comments either here in
the forums or email us at betafeedback@fastmail.fm. We can't respond to
everything, but we do read it all.

Neil.

(Oh yeah, and contact sync via CardDAV should enter beta soon as well.)

[rharha]

Very nice. Already made my first event. I hope birthdays will be shown when it's final.

Thanks!

[bwat47]

Awesome looking forward to caldav and cardav

[rbregt]

Great news. Excellent. Even more reason to move my data from those big data hungry corporates. Have already left Google, and will leave iCloud for contacts and calendar if all will be working well.

[misc]

Well done, I really like the look and feel! And best of all is the way you can customize events to be repeated.

At the moment i can't create a new calendar. When I hit the "Create" button nothing happens. And the interface isn't translated into my language, but that's not that important to me.

[brong]

FYI - you can't create issues with non-ASCII 'summary' fields at the moment, it's a known issue since I just read my notify folder and then saw how bogus the code for handling subject in our server is (not written by me, ho hum)

I'll be working on fixing this shortly, though short is a relative time what with it being Christmas week.

[Radiolarian]

Would it be better to have the calendar default to starting the week on Sunday? That is the standard I am used to but I don't know what the standard is in other places.

It is good that settings screen provides options that should suit everybody.

[Siem]

Originally Posted by Radiolarian

Would it be better to have the calendar default to starting the week on Sunday? That is the standard I am used to but I don't know what the standard is in other places.

It is good that settings screen provides options that should suit everybody.

In the Netherlands we start the week on monday, so having the choose in starting the day off the week is fine for me.

[Clive T]

Excellent news.
Two immediate suggestions:
1. Option for date format in d/m/y
2. Strengthen the colours, particularly for the current day. It all looks a little washed out here.

Otherwise, good job. Look forward to developments.

[ulmus]

i was trying to make whole day event from 21/12/2013 till 7/1/2014, no lack some server error. pls do dates as dd/mm/yyyyy

[qwertz123456]

Originally Posted by ulmus

i was trying to make whole day event from 21/12/2013 till 7/1/2014, no lack some server error. pls do dates as dd/mm/yyyyy

And dd.mm.yyyyy with a dot, please.

@Rob:
And will there be any plans to support two-sync options between Google calendar and Google contacts, because some apps don't let you freely configure the source Cal or CardDav servers, just Google and a few others?

[bwat47]

Originally Posted by qwertz123456

And dd.mm.yyyyy with a dot, please.

@Rob:
And will there be any plans to support two-sync options between Google calendar and Google contacts, because some apps don't let you freely configure the source Cal or CardDav servers, just Google and a few others?

There are a few paid android apps to allow vanilla carddav/caldav sync with any server. (they are like $2.89 each I think).

[qwertz123456]

Originally Posted by bwat47

There are a few paid android apps to allow vanilla carddav/caldav sync with any server. (they are like $2.89 each I think).

There are plenty of apps that don't support that (and I don't mean mobile). Google calendar has become the de-facto standard, I think it would makes sense to allow users to sync both ways. And it's more flexible too.

[akorvemaker]

For me, Google Calendar is the primary calendar I use at home and work. In both places, there are multiple shared calendars. That isn't changing any time soon.

And I would love if I could integrate FM better into my calendaring world. Gmail nicely connects with Google Cal, allowing dates mentioned to be added as events, invitations and things to work quite seamlessly. I'd like the level of connection.

So for me, the ideal would be a calendar that can also do good 2-way syncing with Google Calendar. I could easily add events from emails, and other people who are connected with the Google Calendars wouldn't notice the difference. And I could happily continue living in my FM world

[FredOnline]

Originally Posted by ulmus

pls do dates as dd/mm/yyyyy

What calendar has 5 characters for the year?