Looking at the calendar on my phone, which is connected to several Google calendars, I see a mess of events. There are things that are scheduled for specific times of day, and there are things that are scheduled for “all day”. That’s what’s bugging me today, the “all day event”.

There are some events that really are “all day”. For example, there are some trips that we’re taking that encompass the whole day. But other events, like birthdays and “last day of school”, are not really “all day”. They’re kind of milestone markers; this is the day this happens, but it’s not something that will keep you busy all day, just something of note.

I would like for these events to show up as icons of some type to differentiate themselves from the true all day events. If the event causes me to have “busy” time during the day, it should show up as a bar of allocated time. If it’s just “this is Washington’s birthday”, then it should just be an icon on that day.

Also, there are other events that get dropped into the calendar that are merely reminders that an event takes place on a specific day, but don’t have exact times associated with them yet. The Pickering Valley Elementary School Art Show is a good example of this. It’s on the 17th, but I don’t know what time yet. I’d like a kind of visual alarm to tell me that this is not an “all day” event (like a birthday I can ignore), but an event I need to plan a time to be available for.

I really like my phone calendar, Calvetica. This isn’t really a shortcoming of the software, I feel, just something that mobile calendars don’t do in general. I think the issue I describe is due to a shortcoming in the caldav protocol that is used to transfer calendar data around the net, but I’m not enough of an expert on it to be sure. Still, I wonder if it would be possible to extend everything usefully this way.