Filed under: News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Google, Social Software
Google Calendar update adds web content, 17 new languages
by David Chartier Sep 26th 2006
While you were busy learning how to sync your Google Calendars and Gmail with Outlook, the search giant cranked out some unique new Calendar features and fired up their translation engines. First on the list is the addition of 'web content events' - you can now easily add icons to the top of your calendars that display the weather, phases of the moon and when new Google Doodles land on their search page. You can even publish this new data in the iCal format, and instructions on all this can be found at the announcement post.The other big update is the addition of 17 new languages to the Google Calendar UI, including: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Polish, and English (UK) (those are all links to Google Calendar in their respective tongues).
As usual, these are good updates to a nice Google service, but I can't help dinging them for blatantly missing some of the fundamentals of the calendaring paradigm, such as a bloody todo list (like, um, every other calendar app on the planet) and the ability to set alarms on all events, instead of just those in the default calendar.
I don't want to sound ungrateful though, as I am a happy user of gCal, and thankfully, users in 17 new languages can be too.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Brian said 11:06AM on 9-26-2006
Until Google adds in the basic todo and (more importantly) makes GCal easily sync-able with PDAs and/or desktop clients, the calendar is going to remain useless for a LOT of users.
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Dalton said 1:05PM on 9-26-2006
Hey - are those little icons at the top that say "see offscreen events" new? They let you automatically scroll to the end or the beginning of the day, if they don't all fit on the screen at once.
As for syncing - it syncs one way with iCal, which gets it onto my iPod, so I'm good to go. I guess I'm just not as busy as some people.
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R. Francis Smith said 2:18PM on 9-26-2006
Most mystifying to me remains the inability to add to non-default calendars from the Quick Add box. I continually wind up quick adding stuff, then copying it to another calendar, then deleting the original, which kind of sucks the joy out of it.
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b83s said 3:59AM on 9-28-2006
Syncing with outlook? who cares! i want to sync with my PDA on the go.
I hate outlooks crappy ass sync tools (to active sync) got me more then once, removing appointments or dubble post my contacts. I hate it.
webbased calendars or/and (g)email are the futher.
for smnartphone users there is a sync tool with gcal
http://l-dopa.sourceforge.net/
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James said 10:25AM on 10-03-2006
Could someone tell me whether they managed to get l-dopa working. I can get the software up but when it syncs the program crashes. Would be the best bit of kit if I knew how to solve this problem.
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