Improved Calendar Applet with Evolution Data Server (EDS) Integration

[ArnoldSchiller]

Hi everyone,

I am currently developing a new calendar applet (calendar@projektit.de) and would love to get some feedback from the community and potentially some testers.
The Goal

The main goal is to create a modern, reliable calendar applet for Cinnamon that integrates deeply with the Evolution Data Server (EDS). This allows for seamless syncing with Google Calendar, Nextcloud, and other CalDAV providers already configured in your system.
Current Features

Deep EDS Integration: Fetches and displays events from all your local and remote sources.

Event Management: Basic creation of new events (Summary & Time).

Smart Merge: Modifying existing events works reliably by reusing server-side object structures.

Robust Time Logic: Correct handling of "All-Day" events and timezone offsets.

The "EDS Challenge" (Technical Note)

During development, I've hit some well-known limitations in the GJS (JavaScript) bindings for libecal. Specifically, creating new events with descriptions can be unstable due to inconsistencies in how different system versions handle the DESCRIPTION property. To ensure stability, I've focused on making the core features (title, dates, and modification) rock-solid first.
What I'm Looking For

General Feedback: What features are you missing in the default applet?

Testers: If you are comfortable with sideloading applets, I’d love to know how it performs with different calendar providers (Google, iCloud, etc.).

Theme Integration: Feedback on how it looks with various Cinnamon themes.

You can find the project here: https://github.com/ArnoldSchiller/calendar

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

[mtwebster]

Honestly, I think you're better off writing an app for actual modification and creation of events. I can't stand gnome-calendar's interface for this, but attempting to implement this in Clutter/St, on the single thread for the entire desktop process, is not a good idea.

The stock Cinnamon calendar applet already integrates with goa/eds, and while it could do quite a bit more (showing more event details, for one), it's still fairly lightweight - we use an on-demand python daemon to interact with EDS, outside of the Cinnamon process, which then feeds the calendar applet json over dbus. If there's a problem syncing with EDS, it doesn't affect Cinnamon (other than events being delayed showing up in the applet).

Obviously you'll do what you wish, and the tools we have available to us enable us to attempt just about anything nowadays, but you should bear in mind the potential impact you're having on the rest of the desktop here. Applets are not applications, and shouldn't try to be.

[ArnoldSchiller]

Hi,

thanks a lot for taking the time to explain your perspective — I do genuinely appreciate it, and I agree with you more than I probably managed to articulate before.

In the meantime, I’ve also come to the conclusion that trying to turn an applet into a “full application” is not a great idea, especially given the constraints of Clutter/St and the fact that everything runs on the desktop’s main thread. Your explanation helped clarify where the hard boundaries really are, and I fully respect the design philosophy behind keeping applets lightweight and failure-resilient.

That said, the project has kind of ended up where it is now. The code is largely finished, reasonably stable, and well-documented (I’ve put everything together here: https://arnoldschiller.github.io/calendar/ ). At this point I don’t really plan to extend it further — partly because I agree with you about the limits, and partly because the project has already explored pretty much everything that makes sense within a Spices context. (https://arnoldschiller.github.io/calendar/html/index.html)

For me personally, this was primarily a TypeScript learning and exploration project. Along the way, I tried to see how far one can reasonably go with a Cinnamon applet, without pretending it’s a replacement for a real calendar application. What’s there now is intentionally scoped to quick inspection and light editing of events — not full calendar management — and I believe it stays on the “applet” side of the line, even if it’s admittedly close to the edge.

Given that:

the work is essentially done,

it doesn’t try to move core Cinnamon functionality into the applet,

and it remains optional and isolated,

I was hoping it might still make sense to include it in Spices, so others can benefit from it as-is. If nothing else, it could serve users who want a bit more immediacy than the stock calendar applet provides, without impacting Cinnamon itself.

Of course, I completely understand if you still feel this crosses a line — I just wanted to explain how it came to be, and that I’ve arrived at many of the same conclusions you outlined, just somewhat later in the process.

Thanks again for your time and for the insight — it was genuinely helpful.

Best regards,
Arnold