Saturday, August 19, 2006

Scoble has a really great thread going about his first week using Google Calendar. I love the idea of gCalendar. For one thing, people that would NEVER have kept calendars or sent out appointments are suddenly using gCalendar and inviting me. This is great. I like to keep my historical calendars whenever possible. I have seven years of Franklin Planners and some misc. calendars before that. For the last three years it's all been in the Palm Pilot. I want my schedule up-to-date every where that I need it all time. The one thing that kills gCalendar for me is that I can't sync it with iCal or Palm. I have used the subscribe method to view my calendar but then I can't make appointments on gCalendar to really get the good features. Many calendar applications have features that are almost where we want them. Plaxo syncs with your yahoo or outlook but not with Macintosh. Yahoo is the same. .Mac syncs all your Macintosh machines and puts your schedule on the web for viewing but you can't add appointments via the web (which would give us windows access). Also, I may want to take my appointments off of google someday and put them all in the next coolest calendar app. Why doesn't anybody sync with Palm? The conduits are there. The palm software may be a little dated but is by far the most stable and fastest calendering software around. I use Mark/Space to sync my Palm with Palm Desktop and iCal. Today, a calendar is not just a picture of a cute puppy on the fridge with some birthdays on it. My day, my priorities, my work schedule, my social schedule, lunches, dinners, gigs, parties, etc. is all on my calendar. My calendar has to be accessible and convenient. That's why I carry a palm pilot with me. I would leave the palm behind once in while if I could just use gCalendar and know that anything I put their will appear on my Mac which will then sync with my Palm whenever I do that. Solve this google and everyone will use gCalendar. There wouldn't be any reason NOT to use it. I would keep my gCalendar in sync just because it would be there when I needed it. Acccessibility, Usability, and Convenience: the new magic triangle. comment []  trackback []