You may have caught my post about Dateline, a cool, minimal calendar that sits right on your desktop. Dateline's great, but it's Mac-only. Windows users don't have to feel left out anymore, though. Thin Calendar is a Dateline-inspired Windows app that does much the same thing, but gives you access to your Google Calendar appointments instead of the Mac-only iCal.

Thin Calendar has a semi-transparent, unobtrusive interface that won't get in the way of your other windows. It's great for people who frequently need to use the Google Calendar web interface. When you can't find a desktop client you like, sometimes it's better to have a quick, attractive-looking way to get to the website. You can't change the look of Thin Calendar the way you can with Dateline, but it looks nice enough that you won't mind seeing it on your desktop.

[via instant fundas]

BusyCal is a calendar app for OS X, and its developers would like you to think of it as "iCal Pro." It's designed for families and small groups, and includes a handful of syncing features that make collaborating on a calendar a lot easier. BusyCal syncs to Google Calendar, and it syncs to multiple machines over a Bonjour network, which is ideal for a multi-user home or an office.

Design-wise, it's like iCal with a lot of nice usability improvements. It's close enough in terms of layout and features that iCal users shouldn't have any trouble switching, and it imports your iCal calendars automatically when you start it up for the first time. Among many, many other features, BusyCal also does iPhone syncing, multi-user editing, and a customizable list view. If you're already an iCal or Google Calendar user, it's well worth giving BusyCal a shot.

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

• Upload PDFs to Google Docs
• Google I/O sessions now online
• Edit the Google Mobile page
• Easy way to export gCal ICS files
• Use Google Docs for Craigslist ads
• Google's agreement with Yahoo!

Google today released a piece of software that may just be the holy grail of calendar synchronization. Well, if you use Windows and Outlook, anyway. Google Calendar Sync is a utility that automatically synchronizes your Outlook and Google Calendar appointments.

You can configure Google Calendar Sync for 2 way sync, meaning that any time you update either calendar, the changes will be copied to the other. Or you can choose a 1-way sync which will only copy changes made from one calendar to the other and not vice versa.

What's really exciting about Google Calendar Sync is it gives you a way to synchronize your calendar across multiple devices easily. Just install Google Calendar Sync on multiple computers and now when you update your laptop calendar it will automatically sync with Google Calendar, which will automatically sync with your desktop PC, which will sync with your Windows Mobile PDA. Pretty cool, huh?

Google Calendar Sync is hardly the first tool for synchronizing Outlook and Google Calendar, but it's free and it performs automatic synchronization at regularly scheduled interviews while most other programs cost money and/or require you to activate them manually.

Now if Google would just release a version that works with Thunderbird (with the Lightning extension) and iCal.

[via Official Google Blog]

Remember Calgoo? It's that quirky windows calendar application that fully synchronizes with Google Calendar. We reviewed them here at Download Squad back when they released their "First Draft" version (they're avoiding the 'b' word like the plague), and we're pleased to report that it appears they took our comments to heart while working on this version.

Calgoo Second Draft is a very nice update to what was already a useful, but somewhat difficult to use application. For example, the out of the box experience is much better in the new version. The application immediately loads your calendar once configured, as you might expect. And the look-and-feel of the application, while not strictly my taste, has improved immensely between the previous version and this one.

A number of features have been added as well: full support for recurring appointments, dragging and dropping appointments including changing the duration by dragging just the start or end of an appointment, proxy support, and the already mentioned user interface overhaul.

While Calgoo dislike using the term beta for their software, as a second draft, that's basically what you're looking at. I'm excited about the improvements they've made, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I also saw some instability with respect to the way the screen paints - in other words, I find myself with a completely blank window occasionally. The application has never crashed on me, but there is obviously still some work to be done ironing out some of the screen rendering issues.

All in all, if you're looking for a way to ensure that your Google Calendar information stays with you even when you're not online, check out Calgoo. I just wish they'd take the expertise they've gained with 2-way Google Calendar synchronization, and tackle the problem of getting Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook to synchronize. But until they do, I'll have 3 calendar apps - Outlook, Google Calendar, and Calgoo.

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.

Despite all the advantages of using a web-based calendar, some people still want to use Google Calendar as a stand-alone desktop app, and thanks to a pair of programs--one for Windows, one for Mac OS X--now they can. Gcal.Win and Gcal.app put Google Calendar in its own Window, free from distractions (and free of charge). Another potential solution for Windows users is to make Google Calendar your desktop. The maker of Gcal.Win has also released Googlr (currently in beta), a generalized version of the app that encapsulates many of Google's web-based tools into one stand-alone program.

[Via Lifehacker]

Reader Mark wrote in to let us know that Google has released a Google Calendar widget for Google Personalized Home. It looks pretty standard, showing a calendar view on top and events for the selected day (and the following day if there's room) down below. It also features Quick Add and Create event buttons.

[Thanks, Mark!]

In case you're of the opinion that finding a list of keyboard shortcuts for whatever Google web app you happen to be using right now, you should bookmark this master list of keyboard shortcuts, which has all the hotkeys for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Video, Google Local, and even Writely all on one page. Handy!

It's probably only a matter of time before Google makes a mobile version of Google Calendar, but until then--or for those who prefer their phone's built-in calendar thankyouverymuch--there's GcalSync, a mobile Java app that will sync your mobile device's calendar with Google's. It's a free app that will work on my Java-enabled device and has a surprising number of features, including adding new events to Google Calendar from your phone, but it's still in development so you should "expect some rough corners." GcalSync can be installed by visiting wap.gcalsync.com or, if you prefer, by uploading it to your phone via USB.

[Via Lifehacker]

I'm glad Google didn't wait too long on this one. A week after the release of Google Calendar, they've released the API that will allow third-party developers to build tool for interacting with it. The Google Calendar Data API includes functions for fetching a calendar's feed, adding events, and requesting events based on date range. So far it's pretty basic, and I think we can expect it to be expanded in the near future, but for developers itching to dig in, it's a start.

You read that right. Google Calendar is finally—finally!—live. Somewhat surprisingly, it's dropped the "CL2" moniker it had during development, and very unsurprisingly the logo says BETA. Brad Hill over at the Unofficial Google Weblog has written up a nice review of Google Calendar in which he says "it rocks," it's "brain-dead simple to use," and "as of today I have used Yahoo! Calendar for the last time." I've given it a few pokes and though it would be perhaps too bold of me to predict that Google Calendar will do for web-based calendars what Gmail did for webmail, I will say that it's a great piece of work and suddently Yahoo! has a lot of catching up to do. Head over to TUGW for Brad's full review or go straight to calendar.google.com to get started. That is, as long as the site's not completely hosed by the time you read this.