Google Calendar beat me
Posted by David Harris Thu, 13 Apr 2006 15:29:00 GMT
So apparently Google just released Google Calendar. And, like anything else Google, they did an excellent job at usability, even though it won’t play nicely at all with Firefox (my javascript console is spitting out all kinds of sweet errors). The Tinycal project I was planning on doing may not be a reality anymore. I still don’t like that they did a week view, day view, agenda, etc. Those are pointless to me. However their month view is excellent, and I was able to easily default the view to monthly. It allows me to easily ignore entering anything but the event itself. Entering multiple-date events is easy. It parses basic entries like “2pm Dinner in the dining hall” easily.
Basically, it’s everything I wanted with my own calendar app, except not lightweight enough. While it’s light years faster than most of the other calendar apps out there, I still think they’ve included too much bulk with unneeded stuff. They’ve gone the route of every other calendar out there. I still can’t help but believe that the next generation of calendars will be very different from anything we’ve seen before. Granted, business and education users need to micromanage a day into blocks of time. But people who work a normal job, and have maybe 5-6 events per week they need to keep track of, don’t need to enter a time or location for every little thing. While I appreciate that Google Calendar doesn’t require that, I still think they would have done better by not programming that functionality in at all. Though I do at least like that they don’t force those ideals on the rest of us if we don’t want it. Now if I could tell them not to even load the code for all that to speed it up…
I like the ability to publish and subscribe to calendars, exactly what I imagined for a family or close group to use. I LOVE the ability to have a location hyperlinked to a google map! That is incredibly awesome, as it saves me the extra manual step of plugging in an address. This probably isn’t a big deal outside of larger cities, but people are always planning something at a random place I’m looking up on a map anyway. Great feature Google.
It also looks like they’re trying to take the Evite market. Evite sucks, so it’s likely they’ll succeed. Simply add an event to your calendar, and then notify the people you want to attend. Right now this looks manual, but I’m sure when it gets integrated with Gmail you’ll be able to select from your contact list.
I like that they got rid of “categories” for events. Always thought that categorizing events was stupid. Does it matter what it is, if it makes you unavailable?
Overall, I give it a 8/10. It could be faster, and it could work on Firefox. Right now it does not look like it’s integrated in Gmail. I would love to send an email out that says “Poker tournament 5pm friday my place” and have it automatically create a hyperlink from that, which adds the event to the users calendars if they click it. I think they could do a better color scheme, it’s just too blue right now. Some bolder colors would make it less boring. But they did a great job, enough to make anything I attempted to do useless.
