BreakPoint
NI Week scheduling - what tool are you using?
I'm going to NI Week (Yay!) and I've been using the NI Week Scheduler to arrange my time. It's pretty good, but isn't going to work for me during NI Week itself.
Why? Well, although you can usefully schedule multiple sessions that overlap, allowing you to choose which you want to attend when the time comes, you can't do that with personal entries. It forces you to create personal entries mutually exclusive to other events. I, like may others I'm sure, have a number of non-NI-Week entries, such as the Happy Hour, that conflict somewhat with other entries. I'd like to be able to put them all in, but I can't.
Secondly, there's no convenient App for viewing the content. During NI Week I don't want sheets of printed paper, or to have to get my laptop out, to work out where I need to be next. I want to be able to use my smartphone to quickly view my schedule. The NI webpage scales very poorly on the smartphone screen, so I'd like a simplified view of my schedule that I can scroll and browse easily.
So: what tool are you using to organise your precious time at NI Week?
It isn't going to be pretty. I have work email which is Outlook and I have a few meetings on there for closed door sessions or other meetings work related. Then I have my Google calendar on my personal email, for appointments that are also not a conference session. Then I have the actual conference sessions.
Last year I just had the conference sessions so checking the Android app between sessions worked great, and I would schedule using the web interface. This year I think I will be exporting my NI Week sessions, and adding them to Outlook. Then export my Google calendar and add that to Outlook.
@SnowMule wrote:
IMO the app this year is a lot better than in previous years...
It looks pretty much the same and still has that stupid restriction already mentioned by thoric that private time cannot overlap with any scheduled sessions. (OTOH, you can schedule any number of sessions at the same time without problems.)
The inability to schedule private time is a completely unecessary. A debilitating restrictions that makes absolutely no sense.
In a typical scenario I enter everything I want to see and have to do (e.g. add private time) and do the conflict resolution later, weighting each parallel segment to see what wins. This is not possible if I cannot add overlapping private time. Trying to schedule private time is like vegas. The available start times and duration are a strong function of the calender and often seem completely random. There is way too much extra validation code. All we needs is all possible times (15 min increment) and all available durations (15min....24 hours). Let us enter anything!!!! We can do conflict resolution later once all entries are in the calender. This is completely disfunctional, and same as last year. Useless!
What I did was just enter all my session and export to my google calender. Make sure to set the timezone correctly.
Grr! Definitely leaving the NI Week Scheduling website for something else! I've just realised there are some items that I cannot remove from my agenda! Why on earth can I not remove the Wednesday lunch slot? I've got two private meetings during that time, but it won't let me remove the lunch item and I can't add overlapping personal time!
Off to investigate Google Calendar...
it seems like there could be an app for that......Now what language do you think I would use to program that?
Of course MY needs for an NI week schedule assistant are rather minimal this year
Think of poor old me, stuck up north, when you raise a pint!
Google Calendar imported the NI Week schedule without issue. Now I can edit it to my hearts content, and the Google Calendar app on my phone looks great! Perfect 
