DateBk6 is ugly, eccentric, and complex.
I miss it terribly. The iPhone’s Calendar is pretty and swooshy, but, as a tool, it’s pretty pathetic. It’s one of the reasons I don’t sing the praises of the iPhone. (My lack of praise is probably fully responsible for weakening iPhone sales.)
Give me an ugly jackhammer like the PalmOS DateBk6 any day …
When was the last time that you missed buying a birthday present because there was no ADVANCE warning of an event? Or missed a task because your tasks were not integrated with your calendar? Or spent more than two taps inserting a commonly used event for which DateBk6 has a built-in template? Or needed to look at a week-at-a-glance with the TEXT listed of your appointments? Or wanted to use color on your Palm handheld to emphasize important events? Or wanted to keep your spouse's or co-worker's calendar on your palm - but visibly separate from your own? Or have DateBk6 time-zone aware so that alarms and events are properly keyed to the correct timezone? Or wanted to recover an event that you accidentally just deleted? Or link an event or ToDo to an address book entry and automatically log to it? Or put an alarm on a ToDo? Or handle events that span midnight? Or.....? DateBk6 handles all of these tasks and more. No wonder it is one of the most popular Palm programs ever written…
…Best of all, the proceeds from this product go towards wildlife conservation and the Dewar's Gorilla Haven project in the North Georgia Mountains
Of course nobody would seriously consider porting DateBk6 to the iPhone.
What a developer might do is to make a deal with Pimlico. Work with the engineer (singular I think) to reverse engineer DateBk6. Understand what it does and why it does it. Then build a true iPhone app with a similar set of ideas, but have it sync to Google Calendar and Contacts (maybe sync notes/tasks to Evernote).
Yeah, in theory Apple could produce a good solution and take this niche away but, really, there’s no sign they’ll ever do this. Waiting for Apple to open up their Calendar APIs is waiting for Godot.
So screw Apple.
I’d pay $100 if it worked.
Update 12/23/2010: It's not on the iPhone, but Pimlical for Android has been released.