Marcus Bains Line:

A Necessary Feature for Every Calendar Program

Ali Rahimi (ali AT mit.edu) (last modified Dec 26, 2000)

1.0 What it is

Every time I would look at my calendar program, I'd end up also having to look at a clock to see if I'm near an appointment. The Marcus Bains Line is a classical solution to this problem.

Here is a blowup of a screenshot of the Marcus Bains extension to ical-2.2.

The red line tells you exactly where you stand with respect to your appointments.

2.0 Programs Implementing MBL

So far, a patch exists for Ical 2 (the excellent Tcl/Tk calendar program) and for KDE's KOrganizer.

I can't get in touch with ICal's maintainer. To add a Marcus Bains Line to your ICal, download the site.tcl file and place it in the lib/ical/v2.2/ directory. Here's the full ICal 2.2 screenshot.

A patch has been submitted to the Korganization. Hopefully it will appear in the next release of KOrganizer. Here's a KOrganizer screenshot. Here's the patch, to apply to the KOrganizer source tree.

3.0 Other Credits

Tom Minka helped develop the Marcus Bains line by writing code for an older version of Ical.

And of course, we are all in deep debt to Marcus Bains for his brilliant idea.