Jeff Hobbs at ldopa.net explains in some detail 
why he is ditching 30 Boxes and why Google’s calendar is better than iCal, “which for years has been my Gold Standard of calendaring apps”.
He lays out five reasons for preferring the Google offering, but is particularly taken with the Daily Agenda feature:
Every day, Google Calendar can send you an email at 5 AM laying out the events of the rest of your day. This is killer, it’s like Google just hired a personal secretary for everyone on Earth.
And he sees a long-term upside in this too:
And once people realize that they don’t actually need Microsoft Office to Get Things Done, they’ll soon realize that they don’t actually need Microsoft Windows either.
Then you can read Matthew Hollingsworth’s post at Nontrivial Exercises.
He explains in some detail why 30 Boxes is much better than Google’s calendar.
Any comments on Google calendar not supporting any publishing API?
That is, you cannot publish to Google calendar from iCal (or Sunbird or any of the many other ICS calendar applications). It’s true that you can publish your calendar to a place like iCalX (http://www.icalx.com/) and then have Google subscribe to that calendar so you can VIEW your iCal calendar at Google, but you cannot publish directly to Google. If you could, you could use Google instead of iCalX for your calendar store. What’s more, you could sync iCal and Google Calendar so you could do calendar management from either one and have the other automatically sync the next time you open it.
Some people on the newsgroups have faith that Google will someday implement calendar publishing. I don’t share this faith. It allows people to use Google without having to actually log in to Google. They get ad revenue and usage statistics when people login to Google.
Google wants to get rid of all applications (like iCal) and force you to just use the web version. People point out that you cannot do calendar management on a PDA until you can publish to Google. However, I think Google is banking on people getting Internet access on their cell phones and PDAs and running a “Google Calendar mobile” on the phone that is similar to their “Google Local mobile”.
A while ago, people wanted Google Mail to support IMAP. (perhaps with virtual folders based on tags) This too allows people to use cool Google features without having to actually login to Google’s web interface. It’s the web interface that’s key, and Google won’t do anything to discourage people from using the web interface.
So keep in mind that if you endorse Google calendar, you’re going to be endorsing the end of local computer applications. It may be true that being all-Google is better than being all-Microsoft, but don’t pretend like being all-Google is going to be good for any SOFTWARE DEVELOPER other than Google.
Ted – I completely agree with your point about Google being more of a “closed”, or at least “Google-centric” way of managing your calendar. This exactly what I discovered when comparing it to 30Boxes in my post that Tim references above.
It is always helpful to remember that Google is an advertising company – their revenue is dependant upon people accessing their content, so as you astutely point out, their services will be more closed and inwardly focused that others.
A while ago, people wanted Google Mail to support IMAP. (perhaps with virtual folders based on tags)
I still want and would use Gmail IMAP if it were implemented. Being able to create virtual mailboxes of Gmail mailstores with non-web client apps would be cool. I haven’t found my ideal virtual mailbox solution that eliminates the need for shuffling messages between different hierarchically-organized “physical” mailboxes.
if IMAP support for MailTags is reliable/robust I might seriously consider reducing the number of IMAP mailboxes I current have. For me, a well-implemented message tagging/labeling system could supersede message filing, presuming the former can be essentially a functional superset of the latter. I don’t need no steenkin’ mailboxes. Well, just one. :)
I’d like to get off the Micro$oft bandwagon and move to another vendor (any), and Google is probably large enough to capture my business. The vendor needs to be large enough to carry the momentum of the change (we only use M$ Word because EVERYONE else is using it).
However the catch is the PDA.
I use a PDA smartphone. As a Windows Mobile 5.0 device it syncs with my M$ Calendar and my M$ Outlook. Tough to drop that feature simply because I want to leave Micro$oft….
Google needs to have BOTH a browser only client interface, AND a PDA sync capability.
Perhaps you might be interested in gSync – an another too for iCal Google synchronization. It’s available at http://www.macness.com.
Pavel — do you have a comparison of gSync and Spanning Sync? Your opinion?
Pavel — do you have a comparison of gSync and Spanning Sync? Your opinion?
(I assume you are the developer of gSync; yes?)
Yes, I’m a developer of gSync – this is the reason why I’d prefer someone neutral to compare our product to competitors :)
What I can say in a neutral way is that perhaps the most important difference between gSync and Spanning Sync is – gSync speaks directly to Google whilst Spanning Sync uses a service in between. gSync supports more google accounts.
gSync is more similar to iSync – just thing about mobile devices as about your Google calendars…
… and both products has to deal somehow with beta status of the Google service :)