Same goes for the big software categories. You’d know a spreadsheet anywhere — formula bar at the top, grid below — no matter what company made it. Or e-mail program, word processor, Web browser. They all work pretty much alike.
But there’s one software category, an incredibly important one, where there’s no standard design or set of features: calendar software. Each one seems to have evolved on its own Galápagos island.
Take the new Calendar app in Windows 8. So much of Windows 8’s touch-screen mode is modern, updated and fresh — color, gestures, typography — that you’d expect an equally modernized calendar app at its heart.
Wow, would you be wrong. Listen, Microsoft: 1990 called. It wants its calendar back.
You can’t drag vertically through the Day-view column to create an appointment. You can’t drag an appointment to reschedule it. You can’t record an auto-repeating appointment like “Monday, Wednesday, Friday” or “first Tuesday of the month.”
And incredibly, you can’t create separate categories, like Home, Work and Social. There’s no way to color-code your appointments or hide certain categories.
That same week, on another computer, I installed a Mac calendar program called BusyCal 2.0. You know what’s so brilliant? When you open it, today’s date is always in the top row, no matter what week of the month this is. You always see the next four or five weeks, even if some are in the following month.
And why not? Almost always, you open your calendar to check coming dates — so why fill the screen with dates that have already gone by? That’s a limitation of paper calendars, where every month shows 1 in the first square.
And that’s when I had my epiphany. Our electronics are capable of fantastic flexibility, features and design; why are we still modeling our digital calendars on paper ones?
Apple’s Calendar app for the Mac goes so far as to display a little leather “binding” at the top, complete with scraps of torn-off “paper” to indicate where previous months’ “pages” have been torn off. Why?
If you spend enough time with the world’s calendar apps, you can see, through the mist, a vision of the ultimate digital calendar program. If you could mix and match the best of all the motley calendar apps, here’s what you might come up with.
¶ Give us an alternative to tabbing from Start Time to End Time and typing numbers into a tiny New Event box. Let us drag to indicate a meeting’s length. Or give us speech — intelligent speech, like Siri on the iPhone. “Make an appointment next Tuesday morning at seven: tennis with Casey,” you can say. Your hands never leave the wheel, the cat or the delicious beverage.
We should also be able to type plain-English phrases like “tomorrow 1pm lunch mtg” or “4/15 730p Dinner with boss,” and marvel as it creates the right appointment on the right calendar square at the right time. (Google, Apple’s Calendar for the Mac, BusyCal and, in particular, the iPhone app Fantastical can all do this.) Here again, you’re not fiddling with a dialogue box to enter a new event.
¶ Microsoft’s greatest calendaring effort remains Outlook, the e-mail program that comes with some versions of Microsoft Office. Outlook has its detractors, but one thing it got right is integration with your e-mail and address book. What are appointments, after all, but interactions with people you know — and how better to set up meetings with them than with e-mail?¶ Some calendars, like Apple’s Calendar and BusyCal, offer a “heat map.” It’s a year view in which deepening colors in the yellow-orange-red scale indicate increasingly busy times of your life. When it’s time to figure out when to schedule time off (or time to finish writing your novel), you can easily spot the best months — those with the least red on your year calendar.
¶ Why are we limited to words when our gadgets are digital? We should be able to put pictures, voice recordings, videos and documents on our calendars, too.
Pogue@nytimes.com