Daily Clerks

The online calendar market was a sparse one a few months ago. Within a single year, there have been major developments in the segment, one of which you’ve undoubtedly heard of: Google Calendar. ‘G-Cal’ is the application’s name in my circle, but let’s skip the nomenclature.

Google Calendar is an immensely simple item with lots of nooks and crannies, as all good things are. Google can definitely chalk up several flops for itself on the great big board of internet-born losers, but its Calendar is surely not one of them.

Take its UI. Light tones emphasize its “clean slate” feel. Tabs are positioned at the ready (but out of the way so as not to distract) at the top right, enabling the user to narrow one’s scope from a month-by-month snapshot down to a daily view. An ‘Agenda’ tab is also available, though I’ve yet to make use of it.

Keystroke activation can make or break a product for some “power users”. Therefore Google incorporates some nice touches. For example, when jotting down an activity to be done for the day, say a lunchtime event, just hit Enter, and you’ve now completed the entry. Nothing jaw-dropping, of course, but it means Google took the time to get it right, making things friendlier to those migrating from desktop apps. Think of it as technological garnish. It shows they care… or something like that.

Which brings me to another item that’s bound to stir souls into converting to Google Calendar. Importing. You might balk at managing two calendars – one on your home PC, and one on your work PC, so what if you could migrate them to one place and keep things organized? Well, you can do just that with Google’s application. Discreetly placed at the bottom of the ‘Calendars’ box (located below the miniature omnipresent calendar to the left of the main window), is a ‘Manage Calendars’ link. Click that, and you’re taken to ‘Calendar Settings’, where you can create several specified calendars. One of the tabs located at the top of the ‘Calendar Settings’ menu is ‘Import Calendar’.

As of this moment, only files from Apple’s iCal and Microsoft’s Outlook are compatible with Google Calendar. If you work with something else, I suppose the gods of proprietary software have not been looking out for you. (I believe the Mac equivalent of Outlook, Entourage, works with the same file types, if that’s your preferred organization tool.)

Also in ‘Calendar Settings’ is something for folks that don’t want to keep Google Calendar forever a presence in their browsers. Some just want to get notified about meetings coming up in the day, or birthdays and holidays when they come around. For that there are ‘Notifications’. I’d like to go out on a high horse and say I need nothing of Google Calendar to remember the days that matter most to the friends and family I’m closest to, but I too need the occasional memo to let me know I have to get some candles and cake in order. You be as selective or as liberal as you’d like as far as notifications go. Write whatever you want, really. Choose from emails, SMS messages, pop-ups, or all of the above. Google won’t be picking up your text message tab when your monthly mobile bill arrives, so if you go willy nillly and rack up a hefty balance, don’t blame G-Cal’s infectious notification system for the misstep.

For the most part, your editing options are decent. It offers plenty for the vast majority of appointment-keepers, but you’ll need something more specialized if a micro-manager in the extreme. Granted, you won’t so much fall in love with the design of Google Calendar as you will with its operation, but there’s no price penalty, so I say play with it and see how it fits into your daily or weekly routine. When you can do so much as publish your monthly planner, send invitations, and even Google search through it, you know Mountain View’s finest have done something very right.

Notable:

I thought it would be helpful to mention that if you are a Macintosh user, a nifty piece of kit will be making its way to OS X fans soon in the form of Spanning Sync. It’s a – you guessed it! – syncronization tool which allows you to edit iCal, showing the effects of the edit almost immediately in Google Calendar. You’ll definitely be needing a broadband connection to work magic with this one. If you don’t have the high-speed goodness, chances are you’re not even reading Profy, but if you happen to follow Web 2.0 with one foot firmly planted back in 1.0, jump ship already. It’ll be good for you, I promise.

As for Windows users, there’s nothing as of yet that couples Outlook with G-Cal. If you’ve taken to Google Desktop, this might make you happier, however.

google calendar, ical, import, outlook, review, sync, web 2.0, web 20

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