samskivert.com: jikan

jikan
a calendar and a bunch of lists

What is it?

Jikan is a calendaring and list management tool that works the way I want, rather than the way everyone else in the world seems to think that such tools should work. Specifically:

The calendar shows the current and upcoming weeks rather than giving me a pointless week or month view which are totally useless toward the end of the time period in question, as most of the display is devoted to telling me about the past.
My appointments are shown in a list so I can see what's coming up regardless of how far into the future it is. I don't have so damned many appointments that I have to restrict myself to what I can see on the calendar itself.
It has support for a daily journal wherein I keep track of stuff I did. Some people probably aren't this anal, but I find it to be interesting and useful. Even more so when I eventually add searching support.
It allows the creation of arbitrary lists of things that I need to do, but doesn't try to merge that in with my appointments or show all of those lists at the same time or do any other stupid things.
It works very well with my hacked together CVS-based data sharing scheme. I check the $HOME/.jikan directory into CVS, have a script that updates and then commits in that directory every 5 minutes on multiple machines and my copies of Jikan on those machines automatically reload the underlying files when they change.

It's still a little rough around the edges, but I've been using it for half a year or so and find it to be pretty functional. A few things to note:

Right click on a date to create a new blank appointment entry for that date.
The date and time parsing code is fiddly. You have to enter in "HH:MM xM" exactly (and in upper case) or it will fail to parse. In the future, I'm going to write a graphical widget for setting the date and time.
Right click on list items to delete them. Events do not automatically expire after they have passed, you have to manually delete them. Perhaps someday I'll automatically archive them in the journal.
Right click on the category header to switch directly to another category, left click to cycle through the categories. Click the question mark on the right to add a new category.

Try It!

You'll need Java 1.5 installed and then it's as easy as clicking this link: launch Jikan!

You will need to click the scary warning that gives Jikan permission to write to your harddrive and I haven't coughed up to the monopoly for a code signing certificate.

If that worries you, you can inspect and build it from the source, which is managed with Subversion:

% svn checkout svn://samskivert.com/jikan/trunk jikan

Jikan is released under the GPL. Stop whining, it's good for you. The most recent version of the project should always be available here.

Contribution

Contributions are welcome. Mail patches to mdb@samskivert.com.