Mark It, Dude: Google Calendar Rolls
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Written By Reprise Media | April 13, 2006 | Share This
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We’ve had plenty of screenshots and speculation, but now we finally have a product. The much-discussed Google Calendar is finally out, and all you need to to play around with it is a free Google account (Gmailers, you’ve got one).
All things considered, it’s a pretty nice piece of work. If you’ve seen a decent calendar application before (i.e. Outlook), its look and functionality will be familiar. There’s a little box on the left showing the whole month, and the main space shows appointments for the day, the week, the month, or the next four days, all tabbed for easy switching; you can also view your ‘agenda’ (all your appointments stacked one after the other without showing free time). Making appointments is as easy as clicking on a spot on the calendar and filling in the basics in a form (what, when, where), or using the ‘quick add’ option, which can take a simple sentence like “breakfast at 8 am tomorrow” and turn it into an appointment. Once they’re in the calendar, you can drag appointments into new times or expand and contract appointments to cover different spans of time.
Google has also made it possible to share some (or all) details of your calendar with certain others (or all others - including Googlers), and since users can maintain multiple calendars, they could conceivably make one for themselves and one for public consumption - although it’s probably a good idea to be careful with this feature, since we’ve heard that a lot of people use Google. There’s an option to reveal only your free and busy times (leaving the details private), and it’s fairly easy to invite folks to your events by inputting their email addresses.
It might not be fair, but it’s almost easier to concentrate on what the calendar doesn’t yet do (or do quite well enough). It’s not really integrated with gmail at all, notwithstanding the link to gmail from the top left corner of the calendar (we’ve heard that there’s a smart function that recognizes dates and times in gmail messages and offers to create calendar entries, but we couldn’t get it to work). And you can trade information from Google Calendar to desktop scheduling programs like Outlook, but it’s not that intuitive; be prepared to do a lot of importing and exporting. Altogehter, though, we have to say it’s pretty strong - and so far, demand hasn’t overwhelmed the system (like with the Page Creator fiasco). See more detailed Google Calendar write-ups from Chris Sherman and Philipp Lenssen.
Topics: Google |
>>>be prepared to do a lot of importing and exporting
But at that point, it has lost all usefulness to me. But then again, I still keep my scrap notes on paper.
Well, we haven’t heard anything yet about Google Pencil & Paper, but we promise to keep our ear to the ground.