Google Calendar oooooo
...I'm sorry 30 boxes. I'm sorry everyone else.
Why did Google Calendar seduce me?
- I imports iCal feeds
- I can enter addresses and instantly have it link to Google Maps
- It will SMS me with event reminders (supa nice feature)
- I can create multiple calendars, specify individuals to share those calendars with and invite guests to individual events
- I can add comments to events, allow others to add comments to my events
- I can look at it by day, week, month, next 4 days and a scrollable (easy to print) agenda
- I can show events I've declined
- etc.
But...wait...dammit. Yes. Google is still operating in its own little world:
- Where is my Upcoming.org import?
- Where are the tags?
- No Microformats?
Here are some bonus pictures on Flickr.
[tags: google, googlecalendar]
13 Comments:
It's so busy looking. I think the reason I like 30 boxes is that the interface isn't so busy. All those lines everywhere on Google Calanders makes it hard to look at.
you're a little dismissive of my thoughts.
all i was saying in the previous post is that zipf's law -- the phenomenon of frequency being proportional to rank in a set of items such as words in a corpus or a set of webpages on the internet -- is not new at all. in a collection of texts (the complete works of william shakespeare, say) words like "the" will occur exponentially more frequently than other words, and yet those common words carry relatively little information and value -- most of them will just be ones like "he", "they", "of", and so on (you can whip up a script in a dozen or two lines to verify this). similarly, yahoo.com and the like get exponentially more visits than most other sites on the internet, but most of the information and value on the internet is in those unpopular sites.
so why make and perpetuate a buzzword ("the long tail") for an idea that's been around since 1949? "zipfian distribution" is more precise and meaningful.
a final thought: image and video mining aren't mickey mouse/straightforward CRUD web programming projects, they're fundamentally difficult problems machine learning people have been working on for a long time -- it makes me glad there are web companies who want to develop actual non-obvious technology and algorithms.
I got my upcoming to go in. The upcoming calendar url appears when you go to "My Settings".
Then in Google Calendar, click "manage calendars", click "add calendar", click "Public Calendar Address" and put in the URL. You may get an error, but refresh the page and the calendar events should pop-in.
but its only version 1 of this product (oh no its in beta and i hope it will remain in beta for a long time )
i agree that screen is a little cuttered but there sms and email integration is really smash hit .
i am happy with it .
I like it, but don't find it incredibly intuitive. The sharing feature seems awkward, and I think the UI could use some tweaking. Unlike everyone else, though, I don't find it particularly cluttered.
The SMS reminder service sounds great! Can't wait until it's available in Canada. :-(
I like the way it shows when appointments overlap. Google's contacts are pathetic though, so I use airset. Syncronizes with outlook, and has a decent set of contact fields, plus all of the other calendar features you were mentioning... (iCal, multiple calendars, ...)
G
Tara,
I love it. I have been using gmail for along time and have been saying all along that it was the beginning of something so big. I think with the addition of the calender they have solidified the fact that they are doing something very very right.
I only wish that the people that i have invited that are using hotmail would see the light and join me.
We are getting ready to launch a side project and have found that the flexibility to schedule between the founders has really allowed us to eliminate the need for expensive software that is less functional.
Now i can sit back enjoy calendaring and wait for writely to drop on my gmail service.
cheers
Scott
I was ready to leave a comment about how the SMS feature seemed strangley absent, and then I noticed in the comment below that that feature isn't available in Canada yet.
Boo.
Oh well, I'll be using it anyway.
try www.airset.com - we prefer it to Google Calendar
One thing I didn't see yet, was to be able to open an individual item, and have it open in Outlook (or Notes, or anything which supports opening files this way). Easily do-able if the URL returns MIME type text/calendar with iCalendar contents, and a file extension of ".ics" is used. Eventful does this now.
It's nice to see all that they have done, but opening to a desktop program is my first step to synchronizing with something else. Plus I _think_ that some software on PalmOS might add it to your calendar while using a browser on the Palm/Treo.. not sure.
True, Google Calendar does look nicer than The Boxes.. but it doesn't yet support Safari.. so I'm still stickin' with the boxes and trying to show my support for the 'lil guy.
For me gcal could have been the perfect solution if:
1. Gcal could sync to my mobile
2. SMS notifications are made available worldwide (asia where i am)
if zyb can offer the mobile sync for calendar & contacts coupled with sharing for free (launched recently) why has google left it out..
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