You're doing Lord's work here. Thank you. OAuth2 has been the bane of my existence; it's basically the One Weird Trick to Prevent Automated Use of a Service.
Events may be a part, but not the only part of a good calender. There is a lot of stuff which could be part of a calender but doesn't necessary fit into the event paradigm: Fuzzy events like the car inspection you are putting of. Transit times - not just the fixed time span you get today, but integration of public transport or current car traffic, so that you can plan. If you're menstruating a period tracker. Your health and sleep data. The weather, the day-night-cycle for your location. All background data with time and date, which we have, but not just in our calendars.
And even traditional events are limited: I'd like to have a general repeating workday event but also like events in that workday as extra events. With a normal digital calendar they are clashing. Hierarchical events would be a solution.
Or multi-layered events, some years back there was this blog post on HN which made me rather unhappy with iCal:
There is market for privacy; but the missing piece, after so many years, is how to synchronize calendars in a seamless way.
> calendaring is particularly tricky. Why’s that? Well, consider time zones for a start – a meeting you set up isn’t necessarily in the same time as it is for me, and then you also invited people, from a whole bunch of other time zones (did you know some time zones are 30 mins off, not a full hour?) (…)
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/calendarin...
Then there is the “falsehoods programmers believe about time” list: https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b... , with some counter examples: http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods-progra...
Let's take a trivial problem: holidays. Every account you have comes with a holiday calendar. So if you got a Microsoft, Google, and Apple account you'll have entries in triplicate. These are all day events with identical names. There's a lot of hints to tell you that these are identical and you only need to display 1.
A bit harder would be birthdays. These might not be in a unique calendar. But the word "birthday" is a huge hint when it's an all day event.
I do agree that defaulting to a position of not destroying data is best (though here we'd never destroy data). But that doesn't mean we can't offer users assistance. We do have the capacity to let users merge events or in some way note that they are identical.
One more issue, why the fuck can't I move an event from my Google calendar to my Apple? In the worst case, just copy the damn thing and then hide the event. You can do this even when you don't have write access to the Google calendar.
So the thing I don't buy is that we can't do more. A programmer's job isn't easy. But it involves problem solving. I think there's not enough grumpy yet motivated people who will voice up such things because management usually says that it's not important. But these non important things add up. Life is complex so the little things actually matter a lot.
There's a large amount of things that regular people do with calendars every day, that could be automated or managed through better interaction paradigms, and to which those issues don't apply. That's a lot of low hanging fruits, that everyone's leaving to rot.
Like:
> meeting you set up isn’t necessarily in the same time as it is for me, and then you also invited people, from a whole bunch of other time zones (did you know some time zones are 30 mins off, not a full hour?)
99% of my calendar use involves events happening within days or weeks, and concerning me alone, me and my wife, me and my acquaintances, or me and some random local company. I don't care about timezones for those - they all happen in the same one, with the same DST shift.
(The remaining 1%? Timezone shenanigans happen at few distinct points in a year, and everyone knows to be careful around those and communicate out-of-band if needed. So again, not an issue in practice for users like me.)
Microsoft is thinking about calendars as tools for employees of multinational corporations. But calendars aren't only useful for managers frequently flying intercontinental; there's a lot of regular folks using them for affairs much more localized in time, space, and social graph.
What I would believe, I don't know if true, is that different applications support subtly different feature sets, integration has varying levels of support and correctness and so on. Additionally, I feel like vendors are incentivized to offer good support within their ecosystem, but integration with the outside world is a second-class citizen.
But that's like the entire value prop of using Proton Calendar over the many other options out there, isn't it?
I love Proton, but there are aspects of E2EE that they haven't worked around well enough at present, in my opinion.
The biggest pain points are:
- Collaboration
- Offline access
That's how I read it.
So I ended up just self-hosting my calendar.
It's pretty easy to self-host a calendar, it can be as easy as dumping a bunch of PHP files on a server and connecting to a MySQL database (e.g. using Baïkal).
I have been using DuckDuckGo for years, both for searching and browsing. I love the ability to burn the cookies after each session!
But I haven't been able to replace Gmail, Calendar and Maps (which are quite good products IMO).
It's quite ironic that "google" (search) has become one of Google's worst products.
> To support much-requested features like tasks, search capabilities, and offline access, we’ve started work on our next generation of Proton Calendar apps for iOS and Android, which we aim to release toward the end of 2025.
I've had similar bugbears with their other products which end up in me not using anything except the core mail product.
They seem to improve things over time, but it's a game of patience.
E.g. I stopped using the Drive apps and only use it as an async backup store, because it keeps creating sync conflict files if you sync something you edit frequently (like an Obsidian vault). It also for some reason kept setting my user permissions to read only for my note files while it did this (on macOS).
I have not tried this, but there is some email obfuscation feature:
https://proton.me/support/pass-email-alias
and other email obfuscation services.
Not sure if this would matter for something like a calendar import, as I'm sure how the traversal works.
Also, the author could have tried a Murena /e/ os de-googled phone.
Glancing at my Murena /e/ os "App Lounge" there's dizzying number of calendar options with high privacy scores.
Also, doing some poking around and testing rather than going all-in on proton mail's calendar, esp. if calendaring is so important.
That said I use proton mail's calendar for everything personal and it works "ok" for me.
If you really want to “degoogle” you should probably go for self-hosting or getting a managed OSS product (e.g. managed Mailcow/Sogo Hosting). Otherwise you’re just switching from one crazy billionaire to another.
We can merely choose between which is the seemingly better known evil.
Self hosting is a way to go. It would be nice if one of those "no code" shops could make it a bit easier or something.
https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation
I do agree that self-hosting is best, but particularly for email, that's not trivial.
(It's worth noting for the privacy conscious that Australia, where Fastmail is based, has a truly terrible set of laws when it comes to government snooping, so if your threat model includes the Australian government, probably best to avoid Fastmail.)
Like Proton, it’s Swiss based, like FastMail, everything is using standard protocols. So unlike Proton, it’s just basic mail with no encryption but at least your mails are in a pretty safe jurisdiction.
If you care about it and use the webmail, the UX is pretty much ok but let’s be honest, FastMail is waaay ahead everyone else when it comes to usability. If you just use native clients to access your mail/calendar etc … it will just be the same.
It’s also a little cheaper than FastMail.
Proton is secure. But it can be very hard to work with. I help seniors who were taken there by their more paranoid friends and associates and now struggle with the GUI and tying it into older mail clients
I self-host my own calendar, email, and contacts now.
You can probably do it on a raspberry pi or small NUC at home, with some port forwards over nebula/tailscale from a $5 VPS, if you wish.