After several months of development and a bunch of rumours and screenshots being leaked, Google has finally released their new service Google Calendar.
Like most Google services, the Google Calendar has a nice, clean, uncluttered, straightforward interface. A small “mini-calendar” on the left side of the screen shows the current month, and a larger view to the right shows either the current day, week or month view, the “next 4 days,” or an “agenda,” which is a linear list of all of your scheduled events.
A cool feature for Gmail users will recognize events in mail messages and give you an opportunity to add the event to your Google Calendar.
There’s also a “remind me with Google Calendar” button that lets you add events from web sites that display the button with just a couple of clicks.
You’re also not limited to one single calendar. You can create multiple calendars for specific functions, for example one for family events, another for work, and well others for whatever you might need them for.
You can import your outlook or iCal calendars into Google Calendar, and well you can also export them back.
In the essence of sharing, which seems to be the hype on the web these days, you can also share your calendar with other people if you want to.
Of course, this being Google, search through your events is also included. You can search across your calendars, and of course refine your search with options like “what,” “who” “where,” “doesn’t have,” or a date range.
For an initial beta release, I think this is a really good service and pretty well done. I’ll be testing it a bit more before making the decision of switching to it or not.
I know this is being a bit too demanding, but I hope someone comes up with a little tool that can synchronize between Google Calendar and other offline calendar systems whether it be on a pc, laptop, pocket pc or other handheld device. That would make it perfect, as not everyone can be connected all the time, and it’s be good to be able to carry that info around with you.