2011

The latest news from behind the scenes at Firefly

Calendars: what's new

One big part of the latest Firefly update is a re-write of the calendar engine. We've re-written the calendar views, added mobile optimisation and added new views. As before, you can pull calendar data from remote servers (such as Google or Yahoo! calendars), Exchange Public folders for you Outlook users and also files you've exported from the desktop calendar application of your choice. We've also added an API so we can much more easily implement new custom calendar sources in the future.

A small change we've made in the re-written calendar views is that they now include microformats. Interestingly, Facebook have today also launched microformat support within their events.

So what are microformats?

Microformats are a way of coding certain pieces of "semantic" data (about things such as calendar events) into webpages in a way that is machine readable. Why might we or Facebook want to do this? Because it means your browser and other services can read the data about your calendar events and understand them. For example, search engines such as Google can now display snippets of calendar events in their search based on the microformats. It also means that several browser plugins allow you to automatically download events to your personal calendar without having to re-enter the details.

Where can I find out more?

To read more about microformats, head over to the micoformats website.