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, productivity

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, gmail

GCalSync is an app that offers two-way synchronisation between your mobile/cell phone or Blackberry and Google Calendar.

You can download events from GCal to your mobile phone and upload events created on your mobile, although at the moment, changes made to events on your mobile are not synced.

The past and future date ranges are user-customisable.

Currently the app does not support reminders and treats repeating events as multiple single events, but the developer promises more features soon.

Lots of Nokia handsets are supported as well as many Sony Ericsson models and two Motorola phones (not my RAZR, however, hence no screenshots).

You can read more about it and download the app on the developer’s web site or just point your phone at http://wap.gcalsync.com to get started.Google calendar, cell phone, mobile phone, blackberry, syncing, nokia, productivity

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, tips

In a comment to the post on Michael McCracken’s “Distraction-free” Gmail WebKit browser, Justin Reid posts about how he does the same thing in Camino using javascript bookmarklets.

He uses this script to open his Gmail in a distraction-free Camino window:

And another for GCal (which I quickly hacked out of his Gmail script).

Nice! Just Command-click on the links above and select “Bookmark this link…” to install them.

They also work in Firefox, as one might expect.gmail, Google calendar, camino, firefox, javascript, bookmarklets, GTD, productivity, email, web 2.0

Douglas Bowman at StopDesign has been using Google Calendar for months before its official release.

In a post on his site, he shares thirteen tips for getting the most out of it.

Many of the tips are Mac-specific, ranging from news that the Calendar will soon support Safari to how to smooth the font used for dates. All of them are useful.

If you are a Google Calendar user, you will want to check these out.Google calendar, tips, tricks, mac, safari, productivity

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.ical, Google calendar, cl2, web 2.0