Events, from the software perspective, are business activities associated with the contacts in your network. It ranges widely from lunch meetings with your clients to your coleauges’ birthday parties. However, the nature of events is simple as they always consist of a summary (What), time and duration (When), location (Where), and a guest list (Who). This simplicity just forms the basis of the event management solutions, such as Google Calendar, Highrise and Bizroof.

But, simplicity is not enough in this modern world. We need it to be functional as well. If you grab a cell phone and click through its menu, you most likely to see features like digital camara, alarm, web browser etc. Some people blame the manufactures putting too much functions they never use onto a simply phone. In fact, I am one of them. But, when they pop into a shop to buy a new phone, they always ask questions the quality of its digital camara… Ridiculous? Nope, that is just a common sense of the value of money. If we buy somthing, we try to get as many as they can, and we tell ourselves that we may need them
in the future.

Both simple and functional are equally important. Therefore, the information flow within the application need to be well designed with an objective to provide best user experience. As known to all application developers, AJAX can not only help to simulate desktop-like look-n-feel but reduce the page loading time dramatically by refreshing only updated sections as well. It is a perfect solution for filerting events options, inline editing events and live search. The paragraph below descripbs a simple test and results of AJAX.

Both my coleauge and I are given a same list of tasks (e.g. create new contacts, add new events etc) to do on bizroof. My browser has javascript disabled (i.e. AJAX disabled) while his not. He finished all the tasks in 14 mins while spent 6 mins extra.

Take data sharing into consideration, softwares should be able to talk to each other, not necessarily need to synchronize. We use RSS, RTF, microformats (vcard, hcalendar, etc) to allow data easily shared with MS Outlook, google calendar, iCalendar, Address Book etc.