Marcus Bains Line:

A Necessary Feature for Every Calendar Program

Ali Rahimi () (Oct 20, 2000. Last Updated Oct 3, 2009)

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 The History of the MBL

In September of 2000, Tom Minka and I wrote a patch for ical. You had to download the site.tcl file and place it in the lib/ical/v2.2/ directory. Here's the full ICal 2.2 screenshot.

A few years later, I started using KDE. I submitted a patch for KOrganizer. KOrganizer has had an MBL since. Here's a KOrganizer screenshot.

Lots of people started patching all kinds of calendars after KOrganizer started supporting it. The MBL also appears in several commercial products, where they've either retained the red color, or the name of the line.

Daniel Hsu has modified the MBL for Ical 2.

Thouis "Ray" Jones ported the MBL to Evolution.

Port to a very old platform indeed!: "During the day I manually draw Marcus-Bains lines and slash across the past as the day slips away. That also gives me a clue as to how often I'm reviewing tasks."

Microsoft Outlook now has an MBL.

A Greasemonkey script that implement the Marcus Bains line for Google Calendar. But Google Calendar now supports the MBL natively!

Apple's iCal has also caught up and is using a fairly crude MBL.