Hawk Wings » gcal

Draining the online calendar swamp

Tim Gaden — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 13:18:28 +0000

The latest TWiT “Inside the Net” podcast deals with online calendar services and the quest for inter-operability.

Guest presenter Scott Mace (Calender Swamp ) talks up Apple’s iCal and Google Calendar which get good marks for working well together (although not always). However,

The biggest problem has been Microsoft Outlook, which I would say most of the world’s calendars are stored in right now. And Outlook has not played well with others.

[Pause the podcast here and get a copy of OMiC which helps Mail.app and iCal play well with Outlook-generated email and calendar data.]

Google Calendar gets Scott’s vote for the most complete solution although his wife (“an Apple bigot”) thinks that iCal is the bees’ knees and she does things with colour in iCal that other calendar apps can only dream about.

The open source calendar app Chandler gets a good rap too, although it is still in beta and has been for a long time.

UPDATE: Hope on the horizon for iCal-Google Calendar synchronisation.ical, online calendaring, google calendar, productivity, outlook, gcalSimilar Posts:

Address Book plugin for Google Calendar

Tim Gaden — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:18:26 +0000

Mark Scrimshire has written two plugins for Address Book that automatically add information about a particular contact into a Google Calendar event.

As Mark explains :

The biggest drawback with Google Calendar has been the one-way limitation. I wanted to be able to easily add information to my calendar without having to re-type.

Installation is easy. Download Mark’s two scripts and install them in your ~/Library/Address Book Plug-ins folder.

Quit and relaunch Address Book, then Control-click on the phone or address tab or the contact you want to schedule a meeting with or call.

Select the “Create Call on Google for…” or “Create Google Meeting for… at…” option:

The script then pre-populates a Google Calendar event with phone numbers and addresses for the contact:

I can see how this would save a lot of time.

Google Calendar Add utility is donation-ware (USD 10 suggested) and is available from Mark’s web site .address book, google, calendar, gcal, plugins, quick events, productivity, applescriptSimilar Posts:

Google Notifier for Mac: Gmail, Gcal alerts

Tim Gaden — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 23:05:35 +0000

Google has expanded and renamed its Gmail Notifier app so that it includes alerts and reminders from Google Calendar.

The revised app, now called Google Notifier, adds two icons to your menubar:

In the Preferences you can set which email client to use for composing messages, whether to display an unread message count and to receive pop-up alerts.

The Gcal pane offers similar options for your calendar events.

The email alerts are elegant and give you the sender, subject and a brief excerpt from each incoming email:

UPDATE: As Arsen points out in the comments, the new app has some rough edges. The endless loop of authentication requests can be short-circuited by turning the Gcal notifications off. Not ideal. Rather defeats the point of the updated app. No doubt a fix is on the way.

Google Notifier is freeware and is available from the Google site .

[Thanks for the prompt, Sander.]gmail, Google, email in general, gcal, notifier, notifications, alerts, menubarSimilar Posts:

Gcal 0.2: Smaller footprint, tweaks

Tim Gaden — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 12:34:39 +0000

Chip Cuccio’s distraction-free WebKit browser for Google Calendar has been updated.

It now features a new icon and uses less screen space (800×600), which will please people with smaller displays.

Gcal is freeware and available from Chip’s web site .gcal, google calendar, browser, WebKit, productivitySimilar Posts:

Gcal.app: Distraction-free Google Calendar WebKit client

Tim Gaden — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:54:08 +0000

Inspired partly by Michael McCracken’s distraction-free, dedicated WebKit browser for Gmail, Chip Cuccio has written one for Google calendar.

It does just what Michael’s does for Gmail, giving you a view of your Google calendar without the toolbars and other things that distract you from your work.

Chip has posted the app, the source code and a screenshot on his web site .

Quick work too, considering recent news.ical, gcal, Google calendar, webkit, productivity, safari, gmailSimilar Posts:

A double life: OS X, Windows, productivity, email

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:01:53 +0000

Martin Gordon raises an interesting question .

Now that his iMac boots into Windows as well as Mac OS X, and he needs to spend some time in both OSes, how can he get easy access to his email, calendar and other data in either OS?

His solution is to push everything to the Web, in particular to Gmail and Google Calendar. He no longer uses Gmail’s POP access to read his emails in Mail.app.

Finding a decent online platform-independent RSS reader is more of a challenge.

He seems aware of the problems that a Web 2.0-focussed life raises, access to your information without an Internet connection and data security/backups. Still he is going forward in faith, confident that they can be overcome.web 2.0, gmail, gcal, mail.app, apple mail, windows, bootcamp, mac os x Similar Posts:

Every Google web app keyboard shortcut

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:01:31 +0000

The poser at Smallwire is a good geek.

He says that, “all good geeks know that keyboard shortcuts are the shiznit.” I think that must be a good thing, because he goes on to list all the keyboard shortcuts for Google’s web apps.

You will find there time-saving keystroke goodness for GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Writely, Google Video and Google Maps.keyboard shortcuts, productivity, gmail, Gcal, Google, calendar, reader, Writely

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Get weather in Google Calendar, iCal

Tim Gaden — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 14:51:04 +0000

The web site Weather Underground offers iCal and RSS feeds of local weather that you can subscribe to in your Google Calendar or iCal.

Simply enter your zip code (if you live in the USA) or city name and country (if you don’t) into the search box at the top of the site’s front page.

iCal and RSS buttons appear at the top right under the ad banner. Command-Click on the iCal one and copy the link location. Command-Click in iCal’s calendar window, select Subscribe and paste the URL into the dialog that appears. All done.

You get a series of All Day events providing a forecast of the week ahead:

Personally I get all the weather I need from a Dashboard widget, but I understand how it would be useful to see the “Monsoon” bubble for the day on which you are entering details of the upcoming family BBQ.

You can do the same thing in Google’s Calendar by following the instruction in the post on Lifehacker from which this tip is lifted.

And you can easily use the RSS feed to get the same information into your news aggregator.ical, Google calendar, gcal, weather, forecast, feed, tipsSimilar Posts: