MineTime
A beautiful cross-platform calendaring alternative that just works!

As most of you who know me, I am completely lost without my calendar. So in order for me to switch over to my Lenovo Thinkpad X1C6 running Ubuntu Linux as my main rig, I needed to find a desktop calendar application that works with both Google Calendar and Office 365. This wasn’t an easy find because there are a lot of options out there but all of them either don’t have the features like invitation/e-mail integration (ie. Gnome Calendar, etc) or the UI just simply looks outdated and unattractive to me (ie. Evolution, etc).
After an extensive further searching, I found this hidden gem called MineTime. Not only does it support Windows, Mac, and Linux, it also fully supports Google Calendar, Outlook.com, Office 365, iCloud, and any calendaring service using CalDav. The support and invitation/e-mail integration actually seems to work even better than Apple Calendar in many ways. The only problem I see so-far is that I am unable to quickly copy a google meets link from a calendar event to share with someone via another messaging app but the project is under heavy development so I am pretty sure it will get there soon.
However, what’s concerning about it is also why it’s cool to begin with as it also has analytics capabilities to provide insights into your schedule:

This is concerning simply because of the following:
- I am just looking for a simple calendar app that has all the basic calendaring functions and nothing else.
- Any analytics type of features in applications will take up system resources.
- Privacy — Data in the cloud managed by a developer of a closed source application
To address these concerns, I did the following:
1 & 2 — Disable “Advanced Features”

Marco, the developer of this project did however share his personal opinion with me about how advanced features have nominal impact on system resources and that most of the heaviness really derives from Electron. But seeing that I don’t really care for the advanced features and I prefer to have as little in the cloud as possible, I have disabled it all together.
3 — Read the site and speak with the developer
It turns out that this is an academic project at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). It was partially funded by Innosuisse innovation projects for the first two years and it originally came to life because one of their professors wanted to solve his own scheduling problems. The lead developer, Marco is an intelligent gentleman that is Johnny-on-the-spot with replies to random inquiries about MineTime and he was very patient and detail oriented with his answers. He even offered to do a Skype call with me if I had further questions that needed clarifications. While, closed source is closed source, and given that I am more of a type that strikes a balance between privacy and convenience rather than swinging completely one way or the other, I think this passes my initial evaluation after reading the privacy and EULA pages and hearing Marco’s in-depth answers to my questions.
Conclusion
So until I change my mind about the above or if things at MineTime changes, I will continue enjoying this application. In fact, I have been happily using this application in both Ubuntu and Arch. So a big thanks to Marco and the people who are involved with making MineTime!
What are your thoughts? Brave enough to give this beautiful app a try?
