Calendar and Contacts arrive in Rutba Office, and a meeting invitation is answered where it lands

A mail application without a calendar is a mail application that shows you meeting invitations it cannot do anything with. You read "Project review, Thursday 10:00", and then you go somewhere else to find out whether Thursday at ten is free, and somewhere else again to reply.

Rutba Office 1.8 closed that gap. The suite is nine applications now: Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Word, Worksheets, Presentation, Pictures, Image and Video — free under the AGPL, with no account and nothing collected about you.

Calendar, in the file format everybody already exports

Calendar reads and writes .ics, the iCalendar format every calendar on earth can export — including recurrence rules and time zones, which are where most calendar imports quietly go wrong. A weekly meeting that crosses a daylight-saving change is still at ten o’clock afterwards.

It is not an online calendar and does not pretend to be. Your events live on your machine, like everything else in the suite, and nothing syncs anywhere unless you connect an account that does.

An invitation, answered from the message

This is the part that justified building both applications. An invitation that arrives in Mail is now answered from the message: accept, decline or tentative, right there, and the event lands in Calendar. The reply goes back to the organiser in the form their calendar understands.

A mail application without a calendar shows you invitations it cannot do anything with.

Contacts, and addresses that complete

Contacts reads .vcf (vCard) and CSV, and writes vCard — so an address book exported from a phone, an old Outlook or a web mail account comes across in one go. Once it is there, addresses complete from it as you type in Mail, and a sender you write back to is kept.

And a dozen mail accounts, set up at once

The same release added something small that matters to anybody moving an office: a file of accounts sets them all up at once, from the dialog or the command line. Somebody provisioning twelve machines should not be typing twelve servers, twelve times.

Most people never see a server name at all any more — an address and a password is enough, and the next part of this series is about how that works.