O/S basics

I don't know why this is, the solution seems absurdly obvious...Only recently did calendar and address book functionality become part of the operating system, but it's so basic you have to wonder why it took so long.

It's not like that kind of info is difficult to store and make available...

I was back on this issue because of getting the new MacBook (17") at the beginning of the month (3/09). I wanted to get it set to read the calendars on my G5 and wife's Mini. But I had lost how to publish those other ones, in the Leopard upgrade a year ago. So we hadn't been sharing calendars for months. And that extended to our PDAs.

The problem has several aspects: #1--I don't want my calendars out on the web. I put things in it that are only for her to know about. #2--I'm not buying Leopard Server for another umpty-hundred $ (apparently "LS" has built-in assistance for managing this). #3--I wasn't remembering the correct name for what I wanted to do; I kept thinking it was CalDAV, which it would be for "LS".

What I needed was WebDAV for iCal. Regrettably there doesn't seem to be any helper tool around to get you through the awkward need to use Terminal (cmd-line). Not that I can't, been a unix user for nearly 20 years...but there are more than a few tiny details.

Turned out that I still had the old setup properly in place, I just needed to do the Apache parts, which are about creating a userid/password and a httpd config block. Of course, this means YAPTR (yet another password to remember), which really means it has to get written down somewhere...

I'm still migrating from the old Powerbook onto the new one...there's built-in help for something that complex...why not for WebDAV? Mostly done, except for things like my old address book, the keychain, mail archive, and probably something else I don't remember. I did the manual drag/drop so far, haven't run the migration tool. (Why not? Because I had to completely reconfigure my home network again. Seems I have to start over every single time I add a new wireless device, because I don't remember how I did it before. Even after writing it down. Too many passwords.)

Spelling check should have been part of the O/S years ago, too. Why wasn't it? It's not like that is hard either...granted, a big dictionary is a good-sized file, which would have been problematic >20 years ago, but now? Should be a standard function so that any app can use it.

Built-in general-purpose database, too. That, too, would have been a problem in the 80s...but it ain't now. Granted, there is no shortage of free databases around, but they take a lot of work to do anything, even something simple.

Which is why Excel became the defacto database for an awful lot of information. I mostly use Filemaker for that sort of thing, for my own personal data. It's pretty friendly.

But a built-in database would be the right kind of place to store all kinds of stuff...you could argue that the filesystem IS a database, and in a very loose sense, that's true, inasmuch as you can store anything. But it doesn't really have any built-in organizing capabilities; limited sorting; usually doesn't handle large quantities of files in a single folder very well...

What other things should be O/S built-in capabilities?