Online Calendars
The obsession with Ajax powered hosted web applications is at a fever pitch right now. Companies are dropping copy-cat products left and right on any idea that seems to have the least bit of traction. You can follow all this insanity over at the Tech Crunch. Apperantly for every mediocre idea out there that promises to deliver some web 2.0 functionality, built with an Ajax UI, there is venture capital to be had.
Anyways, none of that really affects me personally. What I am concerned about is finding the best services available, usually free services that deliver exactly the functionality that I want with as little fuss as possible. So here is the straight dope on what I have found in online calendars.
The very first service I found was CalendarHub which was exactly what I wanted, and I was very impressed by it, with a couple minor caveats. It offers very powerful adding of events, my favorite feature is the attendee invitation method. You just put in their email address, they get an email to confirm or reject the invitation. They dont have to sign up for the service in order to send their response, but they can right then and there. If they do, you can of course see their own public or group calendars, because they are added to your group. It has RSS feeds, a bookmarklet, and a desktop client, and SMS or email notifications (all services offer that last thing). The one killer feature of Calendar Hub is the ability to subscribe to iCal calendars on any remote server. Most allow you to import, but Calendar Hub will keep it sync’d. Cool. The bad thing is that this service has a funky layout on the month view that auto resizes to make any column that has an event in it wider than the others. Not the way I would have layed it out. Also, the website badge, which you see in my sidebar is great, but not customizeable at all.
AirSet which is a slightly different beast. It offers the basic calendar functions that you expect, with a somewhat Ajaxy interface. Their calendar layout doesn’t suffer from the autosizing problem that Calendar Hub does. It public, private, and groups. Groups are where all the power is. This app is focused on group collaboration, which is really cool. You invite the people in your group, they share a calendar, you can see their own public calendar items also. Email collaboration is built into the interface for sending. It keeps track of contacts, events, and lists, which are multi-column task lists with some great columns of data built in. (Screenshot) Everything can be shared, or private or whatever you want it to be. The only bad thing I can say about it is that it didnt really fulful my expectations for a Web 2.0 application that should be leveraging the Ajax features we see elsewhere. You cannot drag events around the calendar, or resize your views. But it’s intense collaboration focus really doesn’t let you notice the shortcomings in the interface.
- Desktop Syncronization - it has all my outlook contacts and events that I get invited to, this allows me to stay in sync with the exchange server we use at work, it auto syncronizes every hour. So I get SMS notifications for events in my outlook calendar. Awesome.
- Skype Integration - Call contacts from your calendar or anywhere a contacts info appears.
- **Verizon mobile app - **A PIM app that runs on most modern verizon phones is available to see and edit your AirSet data from your phone in real time, which just turned your cell phone into an awesome PDA. Unfortunately, not mine, I have a Verizon phone but am dropping it because of lousy reception where I live. Hope they expand to other vendors soon.
Planzo had a decent interface, a little more advanced than most, and it allowed for the community and sharing features of the other services. It offers calendars, notebook, and to-do lists. These are adequate. The interface does seem a little cluttered at times. It has RSS feeds… thats about it. Oh, and it will notify you of events via AIM. Which is nice.
One last thing to mention is Kiko which fails in almost every way that these others excel. It has limited collaboration, only stores calendar data, and just doesn’t offer the features power users will need. The only thing is that it hits the interface right on! To create events you look at a week view by default and click and drag a box in a day to create a new event that starts and ends exactly where you want it. The events can be moved around just as easily. And despite some clunky UI graphical elements it provides the functionality you expect from a modern AJAX app. In fact the free/busy, attendee invite screen in Kiko is more useful and powerful than in any other project I have looked at. They really nailed all the functionality a user would need right there. It’s sad the rest of the service isn’t as robust.