Google calendar
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.
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My calendar is imprisoned in Entourage. Hopefully, someone will come up with an effective way to export data from it into things like Google Calendar.
by Milan @ 23/04/2006 6:04 pm • Permalink •
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I'm never sure whether or not to be envious of people who need calenders and diaries. I have a calender on the wall of my office, but have never used a diary, and in 42 years have only forgotten two appointments - does that make my life empty, or merely without organisation. Were I to have regularities in my life, like giving a lecture at 10AM every Thursday, why would I need a diary note? I find that if Iwrite things down, I forget them, because the need to remember them has been removed by the act of writing them down; this leads to me forgetting that I had written them down, because to have remembered I had written them down would mean that I had remembered them...... See; illogically logical. So styles of calander don't worry me overmuch.
Saying that; I have installed the Windows version of "Stickies" on my PC in the office, so we'll see how that goes. Funny though, I can't remember a phone number long enough to dial it, but I can remember how many millimetres and by what angle I moved a Solid Model in my CAD system when I drew it last week, funny thing memory when you get to the age of the "Bus Pass".
Incidentally, I'm progressing with my Mac Mini - I just bought "Photoshop Elements 4" as iPhoto is pretty basic, and I'm fighting an online battle with Apple over their pathetic excuse for network printer drivers - the tell you to use the "GIMP" drivers over a network, but they don't work with Canon Printers, only printing a 1/4 scale page! I went to the Guttenburg site, where it says that almost none of the Canon or Lexmark models have been tested, yet Apple list them as suitable drivers - I'm not impressed; never had that sort of problems with about 30 PCs and about 15 different printers!
by Jonathan Briggs @ 23/04/2006 7:05 pm • Permalink •
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I've already completely switched from Outlook to Google Calendar. One of the features I like is the ability to share calendars with other Google users; they've got a great mechanism for displaying multiple people's events on the same calendar (they color-coding all the events by person). It's pretty snazzy.
by Radagast @ 24/04/2006 2:05 am • Permalink •
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Google is a genius! I use all of its products, including Talk.
by Cathay @ 24/04/2006 3:05 am • Permalink •
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I'm sticking with palm's offering. It does what I need. I am not sure whether to be jealous of Jonathan: my memory is so deficient I had to scroll up to see what I was commenting on. Synchronisable calenders are a great invention, particularly when you are responsible for input to 42 document deliverables every ten months for just one of your projects.
by Ian @ 24/04/2006 6:05 am • Permalink •
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Wow, I like the way that if you just write in a time, say 15.30, at the start of a quick event in Google Calendar, it automatically converts it to a 15:30 start in your calendar, and makes the event last an hour.
But sadly, I have very little need for a calendar. Nowadays, I don't even have iCal on my Dock. I find that a normal block of paper does me fine! However, if I did need a calendar, then I think this one from Google would be very useful!
by David (TEFL Smiler) @ 24/04/2006 11:04 am • Permalink •
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definitely an A-1 service, as always they are slow to offer all the functions to non US users (eg SMS notifications, mobile access) yet the interface is delightfuly simple, another cool sharing service can be checked out at http://zyb.com with sharing for contacts list as well, pretty green but they are catching up fast. i would love to see google extend
by Prat @ 25/04/2006 12:04 pm • Permalink •
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definitely an A-1 service, however as always thet are slow to offer all the functions to non US users (eg SMS notifications, mobile access) yet the interface is delightfuly simple, another cool sharing service can be checked out at http://zyb.com with sharing for contacts list as well, pretty green but they are catching up fast. i would love to see google extend
by Prat @ 25/04/2006 12:05 pm • Permalink •
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You can say that again,,,,,,,
by Jonathan Briggs @ 25/04/2006 6:04 pm • Permalink •
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Milan: Yes, getting things in and out easily is vital for a system like that.
Jonathan Briggs: I really admire your memory, and you're right: delegating the task to a computer just makes your memory even worse. The problem is that I've never been much good at remembering appointments, and that horrible, queasy feeling that you might have forgotten something important just causes me unnecessary stress. It doesn't help that a lot of my lectures and meetings are on a very irregular schedule. If they really were every Thursday at 10am I might not have so much trouble. So I've pretty much always used a paper calendar, and switched to an electronic one about 10 years ago. Re: printer drivers, I've never had to use a different driver for a network printer. I've usually found that the ordinary driver for the printer works just fine. I seem to remember that there are quite a few Canon drivers installed by default, and if the one for your printer isn't there, you could probably download it direct from Canon. Perhaps I've been lucky, but I've never had a printer driver problem with any Mac, and I've used HP, Epson, Brother and Canon printers, both USB, USB shared over a network and properly networked.
Radagast: I haven't really used the sharing thing yet, but it looks quite cool.
Cathay: I use GMail and search and now GCal, but that's about it.
Ian: That sounds very scary.
David (TEFL Smiler): The quickadd is very cool, actually. It seems to work very smoothly without you having to think too much about how you phrase things.
Prat: Yes, I'm sure they'll improve support for International users fairly soon.
by bsag @ 26/04/2006 5:05 pm • Permalink •
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Adding to all the good points already raised, how about the map link it creates for an event? That is very cool, and if you want it to be pinpoint accurate (say you are making a public calendar of events you want people to come to), you can use to find the coordinates, put them into the Where field of the calendar event, and you have a Gmap point for the event.
by stl @ 01/05/2006 1:05 am • Permalink •
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