Some days ago I had this idea of a calendar browser showing my upcoming events in a 3D perspective, i.e. events of next week are close by while events some months away are far in the distance. The purpose is that I get an intuitive impression of things to come, their sequentiality and relation - something I miss in the typical grid-like calendar views offered by iCal and Outlook. I talked about it to some of my colleagues and when I tried to explain the idea, I said something like “It should be like looking at Google Earth from a tilted angle, events placed on a sphere which I can roll back and forth“. It took me some moments, then it hit me: It’s easy to place markers on Google Earth by using KML files - and by using Google Earth as a platform, I get all the UI features I need for free.
Fast forward to one and a half days later: A very basic implementation of the “iCal meets Google Earth” mashup is ready, which I call einstein, well, because what it does is some kind of joining space and time. I used Ruby (of course), employing the vpim library for extracting iCal data and XML builder templates for creating the KML output. In the end it was almost too simple.
And this is what it looks like (by now):
