Google Calendar

It’s here! Is it called CL2? Nope. Just Google Calendar Beta. ZDNet’s posting on it has already been Dugg a bazillion times!

Here’s the main page that takes you to your default view, which at this moment, is the week view for me (user selectable). Looks like iCal to me.

The “Quick Add” interface if pretty cool, if not taken from the book of 30 Boxes (and possibly elsewhere). Natural language time statements have been a staple of Unix command line tools for a long time, so this is not rocket science. Initial testing seems reasonable. It assumes today, and you can even put in duration as “4:00pm-4:30pm”, or “for 10 minutes”. Cool.

There is a general “Create Event” interface that gives you a more form-centric view. Not terrible, not fantastic. The form is Ajax-y in the right places, but doesn’t seem to work great for specifying time. The “Add guests” is the most tantalizing feature — giving the lay person Exchange-style group calendaring for free — but it seems to not send notifications just yet.

For the interested, appointments are draggable, and stretchable, just like you expect.

The settings pages aren’t that special. The Notifications page is pretty sweet. Set your notifications to Email, PopUp, or even SMS. Cool. The PopUp seems to work just fine, and I haven’t tested the others.

Importing calendars is cool. Presumably one could dump their Outlook into a CSV and upload it here. Of course, iCal format is supported. Heck, searching for calendars yields a bunch of Apple public iCalendars. Awesome.

Surprisingly, the public calendar search feature seriously sucks. I couldn’t find anything that I really wanted playing with it for 2 minutes.

Here’s a more fleshed-out calendar, now adding a longer appointment view quick add.

Day, Month, Next 4 Days, and Agenda views.

Sharing calendars is awesome. Seems to work just great. Here’s the interface to set it up (you can also use the Calendars thingy on the left navigation bar).

And here’s the result (shared entry in green).

So, Google is further taking over and making Google World! Scary.

So far, the calendar seems pretty complete. Notification of invitations needs to happen before it goes anywhere for real, but it sure looks like they have all the basics in place.

More to come soon.