Apple’s iCal Team is looking to hire a software engineer.

The job description on Apple’s web site says that Cupertino is “looking for someone eager to take iCal to the next level and increase it’s integration with other applications in Mac OS X.”

It goes on: “iCal is a calendar and scheduling tool for Mac OS X that is one of the premiere applications in OS X, and we have great plans.”

I wonder if those plans include unwinding some of the changes made to the interface in Leopard.

Dennis Sellers at MacsimumNews is not the only person who believes that Leopard iCal is a “a downgrade of the product” because of “the extra clicks needed to enter an event or to, for example, correct an entry”.

MacNN takes it further:

Some are saying that this “downgrade” is the sole reason that they can not upgrade to Leopard, and that Apple should ask its users what they need to change instead of doing what it thinks is best for everyone. The largest complaint is that the information ‘bubble’ is too inconvenient to call up – requiring a double-click – in contrast to the old pane that would update as a new event is selected. Almost all are imploring Apple to either modify the current method or to re-instate the drawer, giving users a choice of how they want to use iCal.

If you were King (or Queen) of the iCal Team for a day, what would you ask the new employee to fix first? ical, apple, cupertino, the ical team, leopard, interface

A web site called Butter Fat offers you the opportunity to track the path of your emails using Google Maps, using geographical lookup provided by hostip.info.

Paste in the headers of an email and it traces the jumps from server to server. If you choose your email carefully, it can also show you the location of a particular server.

It may not do a very good job. I discovered, for example, that the mail server at my new web host TextDrive is housed in the middle of Montgomery Field Airstrip in San Diego:

Perhaps it does a better job with .Mac. At least, the trace places the server on the same map as Infinite Loop, in leafy September Drive:

Who knows? It is, at any rate, an entertaining and interesting way to waste thirty minutes or so.email, traceroute, Google maps, dotmac, .mac, textdrive, servers, Cupertino