j’s scratchpad

At the urging of several friends who wanted me to try the latest cool tool, I set up Google Calendar yesterday. True to my ability to break just about anything, I think I found the first bug in fewer than five minutes. I’ve been using Yahoo! Calendar for years and have been fairly happy with it.

I like the way Google Calendar lets me display other people’s calendars on mine. Being able to merge calendars for the sake of scheduling is quite useful. It’s also nice to be able to set up different calendars for different purposes and have different levels of sharing. And XML feeds: ++! What more can I say about that?

Entering calendar data is fairly standard. Google gives a few more options for repeating events than Yahoo! offers. I would like a tool that gives still more flexibility with that, especially as I was entering MIT IAP schedules. (There are cool, free programming courses. Maybe I’ll finally go learn some programming.)

One thing it does that Google Calendar does not do is give a summary of what I just added to the calendar with its confirmation message. Since I had to manually enter a lot of data into Google’s calendar yesterday, there were a few times where I forgot what it was I had just entered. Seeing a summary on the screen would have been quite helpful.

Addendum 1/16: It just took me a few minutes to figure out how to edit an event. Clicking on the linked event in the calendar doesn’t produce a screen where editing is obviously possible. Clicking on the background around the linked event gives you the option to edit the event or delete it. By accident, I discovered that clicking on the various pieces in the more detailed view changes them from static text into editing boxes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.