So after insane amounts of speculation, Google Calendar has finally arrived. About time. I have been waiting for Google to get their calendar up and running for many moons now. And now that is finally here, I must say that I am not all that impressed.
Now before I continue, I should disclaim and say that I have only used Google Calendar for about 15 minutes (three entries). With that said, here are my initial impressions.
It looks nice. If you have Gmail, then you will feel right at home with Google Calendar, as they use the exact same styling for the layout (navigation on the left, search on the top, content stretches to the right). As of now the ads are not on the right of the screen, but I assume that eventually they will be. It is just a matter of time.
Concerning adding events, it is easy. Roughly four mouse clicks and you have an event added to your calendar. However, this simplicity has created a serious lack of options. With MSN Calendar (Hotmail) and Yahoo! Calendar at least I can add categories (Birthday, Holiday, Vacation, Business, etc.) to my entries to help me distinguish at a glance what is what. None of that here. I can add a description, but I personally do not want to type in “Birthday” over and over again. I want to select it from a drop-down, and have a little cake show up next to the entry (or have it be a certain color). And given that such a feature would be an easy/small addition, I cannot see why it is not there.
Next is the view. You can change your default view to almost anything you want (one day, three days, one week, two weeks, a month, etc.). However, none of the features work particularly well. The month view is your standard monthly view. The problem is that the entries are shows in plain blue text with really small letters. They do not stand-out against the background in any fashion and are easy to glance over. There is also a mini-month view on the sidebar which has dates that have an event in bold. However, if your event falls on a Sunday, the bold is hard to distinguish against the blueish background color of the calendar. This is just bad design.
Anyway, seeing as how I like to visually see what is coming up in the near future I selected the “Agenda” view which shows a list of upcoming events. However, there are two issues regarding this view that keep me praising this view.
The first is that it is an incredible waste of space. Something like an “Agenda” (which is basically a to-do list) should be located as a sidebar item. That way, I can view my preferred layout (weekly, monthly, work-week, etc.) and still be able to glance at what is coming up next with minimal effort and no clicking of the mouse. However, I cannot. I either look at the week, or at the month, or at the agenda. I cannot do both, and I am required to click my mouse to see one or the other. Again, this is just bad design.
The second issue I have with the “agenda” view is that the amount of time shown is too great. By default my calendar is showing events between 02/12/2006 and 08/05/2006. I really do not need to see six months into the future. If I were to actually populate this calendar with one of my old school schedules or my current work schedule, I would have an agenda list that is at least a few hundred entries long. That is simply too much. I like that I can view that far into the future should I need too, but I think having it as a default setting is again, simply bad design. Also, if today is 04/13/2006, why would I want to see back to 02/12/2006 in my agenda? I wouldn’t. When I look at my agenda I want to see what I have to do “next.” I want to be able to glance at the first entry and know that that is the very next thing that I have to do. I do not want to see what I did a month ago. Nor do I want to glance at the top item and get confused and start preparing for something that has already occurred. Grrr.
Ok. That is all for now. I am going to play with the calendar some more. It has some nice features (calendar sharing, xml support, easy importing, etc.) that I want to play with. The calendar sharing looks promising as it looks like you can have overlapping calendars with other Google Calendar users (this would be great for group projects). I will try and report back later and give some details on what I find. Adios and enjoy.
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