Archive for April, 2006
Google Calendar
April 13th, 2006
For the past few years, I’d been using Microsoft Outlook’s calendar functions to plan my classes and organize my daily affairs. Without an external calendar app of some sort to help me keep track of everything I need to do, I wouldn’t even remember to wake up in the morning or breathe most of the time. But Outlook 2003 is riddled with mysterious bugs that have sometimes caused me to lose an entire semester’s worth of class schedules, it’s slow as continental drift even on my hopped up Sony media-monster desktop, and…well, I can only access it from either my desktop or laptop (which hasn’t even been functional for the last five months).
Recently, I’ve become a huge proponent of non-localized web applications that I can access from ANY computer terminal or ‘net-capable device such as my cellphone. In fact, I am a complete Web 2.0 junkie. I go into withdrawl if I don’t get my daily AJAX fix. So far, I use ProtoPage as a general start-up page and link repository, GMail for email and online chat/collaboration, Del.icio.us for bookmark storage, Backpack to manage to-do lists and store assorted worknotes, and Writely for document writing. It’s getting to the point that I don’t even need local apps like MS Office anymore (except for spreadsheets and presentations, because so far I haven’t come upon web-based versions of either Excel or PowerPoint)…but I hadn’t yet found a decent online calendar package that could do the same stuff as Outlook. I was using HipCal for a while, but at best its functionality was basic and it’s almost as buggy as Outlook.
When I heard Google was working on an online calendar app that would be closely tied in with Gmail, I immediately got excited. Google’s last few offerings (such as Google Video and Google Talk) didn’t impress me very much, but GMail is, easily, the best web-based email solution to have ever existed. The scuttlebutt on the net was that Google Calendar was going to tie in very tightly to GMail and be built primarily in AJAX to give it a solid foundation of wide-spread functionality. Leaked screenshots showed a GUI very similar to Apple’s iCal, with nifty colorschemes and extremely easy, intuitive methods of adding new events.
Google Calendar went live yesterday, and I leaped at it like a starving badger. I was sold within seconds. Google has provided an excellent tour of Calendar’s functions, so if you want to check them out for yourself, go there for the full scoop. All I’m going to do here is give you a brief rundown of what makes Google Calendar so useful to me, which will hopefully illustrate how useful it can be to you as well!
First and foremost, Google Calendar lets you implement multiple calendars…so you can have one for, say, personal events like doctor’s appointments, birthday reminders, and anniversaries–and another for professional activities like meetings and classes. Each calendar’s visibility on the day, week, and month lists can be toggled, and you can assign different colors to the individual calendars to let you keep them straight. These calendars can be private, or shared with other people, even if they are not registered Google Calendar users. Furthermore, you can send invites to scheduled events (parties, for instance) by providing folks’ email addresses when you create an event. Calendars can also be subscribed to via the icalendar standard or RSS, making it even easier to keep track of others’ calendars or let others keep track of yours. And, of course, there are a plethora of reminder features that can let you know when something is coming up by sending you emails, text messages on your cellphone, or just showing pop-up bubbles on the main screen.
Adding events is ridiculously easy. I generally use the “Create Event” link on the uppermost left because it gives you the most control over event parameters, letting you: set the usual stuff like names, times, and repeat options; add comments; add email addresses of people to invite to the event; and, of course, select which of your calendars you want the event to be added to. “Quick Add” is a nifty little addition, too, allowing you to type something like “Meeting at Mike’s Office at 5:00pm on April 12,” which Calendar will automatically parse and add to your default calendar. Setting repeat options for re-occurring events is a little weird, as the options given are surprisingly limited: for instance, I have a class that meets every Monday and Wednesday, but the only repeat option I can select that is close to that is “Every Mon., Wed., and Friday.” Which gives me an extra event listing on Friday of every week that must be deleted by hand. Somewhat annoying, but I’ve already sent an email to the development team letting them know that this is something they might want to look into.
But this is what really sold me on Google Calendar. When I’m adding a class to my Penn State calendar, I set the first occurrence as the first day of class and set the repeat options to fill in every, say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from the first day of class (January 18) until the last day (April 26). All that does is basically fill in the slots to let me know that I have class at those times on those days. But I like to use my calendars to plan my classes as well by annotating each separate occurrence with the lectures or activities scheduled for those individual days. This was simple to do in Outlook: just double-click on any instance of an event and select the checkbox for “Edit this occurrence” in the dialogue box that pops up. No other online calendar package I’ve ever encountered let me do that, which obviously limited their appeal, since that’s primarily why I used Outlook in the first place. Fortunately, Google Calendar lets you do that, too. Just click on any colorful block in your calendar view. When the bubble with extended information pops up, select edit–it will then ask you if you want to modify this particular instance of the recurring event, or the entire series. Select “This Instance Only” and modify away! Your added information will show up on that day’s instance and no others, which makes it simple as can be to plan individual activities for a series of events.
Of further interest is Calendar’s close ties to Gmail. Anytime you receive an email that contains time/location-related information, an option to automatically import that info into Calendar is available on the right of the message. There are also many options for exporting calendars as comma-separated values and iCal files, as well as importing the same from any calendar programme that can save info in the same formats. We’re talking serious interoperability here!
Managing calendars and individual calendars’ sharing options is incredibly easy and intuitive. The interface is pure Google: simple, colorful, and very easy to navigate. The learning curve for Google Calendar is so shallow it’s practically a straight line from logging on to being a Calendar pro in under five minutes. Simply put, this is a superb web app that will no doubt prove itself virtually indispensable to many people in no time. I can now access my various itinerary’s from ANY computer, meaning that I needn’t lug my laptop around with me everywhere, nor worry if it’s stolen–my calendar information is safe on Google’s servers.
Check it out. You will not be disappointed.
