Ian Lewis' Blog

Today I'm messing with Google Calendar. I've been using Yahoo's Calendar which is nice and has features for everything I use and ties nicely into Yahoo Groups. It has the capability of providing 2 reminders, which I like. These reminders can come to you as e-mail or go to your cell phone. You can provide a location, along with other data such as a phone number and location name. You can schedule repeating events using odd schedules like "The second Friday of the Month" (which works really well for our Japanese Meetup Group because it ensures that the repeating event happens on the same day of the week every month), or 'Every other day' or 'every third day'. You can enter multi-day events, and it handles them ok, creating a new box for each day. So a three day event looks like 3 identical one day events.

Google Calendar doesn't allow you to put in as much data as Yahoo groups. You can put things like directions, information, or a phone number in a description but it doesn't show unless you look at the event details. It allows you to put in the location of the event which is normal. But I've found that if I put in the location name in with the address of the location, sometimes it doesn't open up the location correctly in google maps. It also doesn't support 2 reminders, and the reminders seem to come up as a popup by default when I have the calendar open rather than as an e-mail. It's also not integrated with Google groups, which is in-and-of-it-self designed as just a mailing list, and doesn't hold a candle to Yahoo groups which integrates a calendar and photo album along with the mailing list for your group. Sometimes it's also a bit unresponsive and gives you no indication that it's doing anything because it's all AJAX.

That said, when comparing the two Google Calendar looks much better. There are no ads. It handles multi-day events well, displaying them as only one box, showing the title only once. It also allows you to repeat a meeting on Mon/Wed/Fri, or Tues/Thurs which Yahoo doesn't do. This is good for me as I have Tues/Thurs events. It also would be easy for students I imagine. Though it does have a weekly option with checkboxes to select the days of the week to repeat on. It also allows you to change the time and date of the event easily using drag-and-drop and normal gui (however, I'd add that events for me don't change that much and it's no problem to go to the event to change it. Drag-and-drop is more likely to be done accidentally than on purpose for me). Another thing that it does that Yahoo doesn't do is display Japanese/UTF-8. That's a big plus for me.

Overall, there are things I like about both but Google wins for it's good looks and ability to do everything I want. But even though I like Google Calendar, it seems like a work in progress and I'm looking forward to new versions of the calendar.