23 Apr 2006
Google Calendar came out a couple of weeks ago, and I've been having a bit of a play with it. I use Apple's iCal as my main calendar, syncing it with my phone so that I've got access to my diary on the move. However, I've also been trying out some of the available online calendars that have been cropping up recently to see if I could use them alongside (or perhaps, instead of) iCal.
When you first think about what a calendar should be able to do, it seems as if it would be pretty trivial to create a really capable one. After all, it's just displaying a list of events which have a date and and optional start and finish time, right? But when you think about it more deeply, you realise that there are things like recurring events (with all kinds of recurrence frequencies), reminders and notifications, different views of the data, sharing of events between individuals or different applications (in and out), invitations, scheduling and so on. And that's before you sit down and tackle the all-important look and feel---calendars have to be very easy and natural to add events to, and they have to make it easy to find things, either by event or period.
A lot of online calendars have sprung up recently, and I've personally tried out 30boxes and Kiko. Both have a lot of nice features. 30boxes has a lovely stripped-down and clean interface, with a dialog box that floats over the calendar then disappears when not needed. However, it doesn't show blocked out sections of time in either the daily or weekly views, which I've come to depend on for judging how busy I'm likely to be on a given day. Kiko is a bit busier visually (though you can turn parts of the interface on or off), but shows blocks of time. Given the clout that Google has, both of these applications are going to have quite a fight on their hands.
Google Calendar itself is pretty nice, though missing a few features at this early stage. The interface is the clean, stripped-down affair you'd expect from Google, and the keyboard shortcuts---like those of GMail---make navigating around and creating new events very smooth. Like 30boxes and Kiko, there's a form for creating new events in natural language: "Meeting with Anna 2pm next Friday", for example. There's a nice Agenda view that shows your events in list form, making it a good format to print out if you wish. At the moment, Safari isn't supported which is a bit of a pain, and only a limited selection of mobile phone carriers are listed in the SMS notification settings, so non-US users are mostly out of luck. Importing iCal calendars works well, but I haven't had much joy with the RSS feeds so far. I'm hoping that all of these things will be improved over time. It's quite an exciting time for Calendar geeks.