Ever notice that there's a missing feature on Facebook? Ok, it's not the ability to be able to add 5.001 friends. Get over it, nobody can have that many friends.
The real feature that's missing is an event calendar! Sure, we know whose birthday it is every day when we log in, and sure we know when the next event is because we get 83 emails reminding us, but where's the event calendar???
Well, fbCal solves that all. With a simple install of the Facebook app, it creates feeds that you can pull into iCal, Google Calendar, Sunbird or Outlook. In TWO separate feeds, too. One for birthdays and one for events. External access to events is something a lot of people have been waiting for.
Never again can you forget to get your best friend a birthday icon from the Facebook store for her 35th birthday that she's really upset about and wants to spend it alone on Facebook the whole night. Don't ask.
You can either download a file and import, or subscribe to the feed and it will sync like the wind. Like a very fast technological wind. Whatever that means.
This was built by a gent named Robert M. Baldwin, and we salute you!
For some bizarre reason, the Official Gmail Blog has announced a new feature for Google Calendar that is powered by Google Finance. Nevertheless, it's a pretty cool new trick: now, you can search for your favorite stock symbol in Google Calendar to add a repeating all-day event of that stock's closing price each day. If you've been looking for an easy, casual way to keep track of a few stocks without having to dive into more serious solutions, this is a great way to keep an eye on a stock over time.
Keeping track of calendars and appointments might say 'boring' to many users, but Google is aiming to change that stigma with their new Calendar gallery. With nary a 'Management Strategies' event in sight, this collection of subscribe-able calendars (which anyone can add to) is all about fun, travel, sports and the rest of life. Featured calendars include a Netflix DVD release schedule, Orbitz deals, presidential travel schedules and even specific TV show schedules.
Don't fret about the calendar subscribing process, as you won't have to deal with cleaning out schedules you never meant to follow. Clicking the name of any calendar offers a handy pop-up view of the entire month and all that particular calendar's events, allowing you to get a birds-eye view and decide before actually subscribing.
This is a great move for Google Calendar. Until now, users could only search public calendars, but not browse any kind of list, let alone see them organized into categories. Now that you can also view Google Calendar on your mobile phone, you never have to miss another appointment or actually interesting event again.
Why Google hasn't built something as fundamental as a todo manager into Google Calendar is beyond us, but now you have one more option for tasks on in gCal. While we've previously seen hidden code lead to speculation that todos were (finally) coming, as well as Remember the Milk integration, a new Greasemonkey script brings its own todo list to Google Calendar with an interesting twist. As you can see, this script from Google Operating System gives you a basic todo list without anything like alarms or filing in different calendars. The advantage here, however, is that the script saves todos as events in your calendar, which means you can get to these todos from any computer on which you install the script.
Check out Google Operating System's post for more details, or simply install the script to hit the ground running.
During the six months I've been writing for Weblogs Inc, I've only met with coworkers twice. But that doesn't mean we don't communicate. Bloggers make liberal use of email, chats, and other tools to keep in touch with one another. But the truth is, there's a whole world of tools out there that are making it easier than ever for teams to collaborate on projects, be they websites, software design, or entrepreneurial ventures.
Alex Iskold at Read/WriteWeb has a great tutorial on using software to set up a virtual office. Some of the software is commercial, while other programs are freeware. And while Iskold gives his recommendations in each category, he also lists alternate programs you might want to check out.
The article covers communication tools (Skype), project management software (BaseCamp), presentation tools (GoToMeeting) for showing coworkers what's on your display, Calendars (Google), Code repositories for software developers (CVSDude), accounting software (Quickbooks), and a backup system (ElephantDrive).
What do you think? Do you work in a virtual office? How does it compare to your old office job? Is it easier or harder to get work done? How important are Web 2.0 tools to your collaborative efforts?
GMobileSync is a new program that allows you to sync your Windows Mobile PDA or Smartphone with Google Calendar. The free program is still in development, and right now, when I say "sync," I mean, download your Google Calendar to your device. 2-way syncing is expected in an update scheduled for release next week.
GMobileSync's not the only fish in the sea here. GooSync is another free program that does basically the same thing. But in our rigorous Download Squad testing, Jason Clarke found it to be somewhat unreliable.
If you're looking for a far more complex solution, you can try to sync Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook, and synchronize Outlook with your mobile device using ScheduleWorld.
I'm just glad to see folks working on solutions that let you back sync your PDA to a web service of your choice. Mac and Linux users have been left out in the cold by Microsoft when it comes to synchronization with a Windows Mobile device. Programs like The Missing Sync have stepped in, but there's really no reason you should tied down to synchronizing your data with Outlook or other desktop calendars if you'd prefer to use an online system for personal information management.
Google Calendar kicks some serious butt. Unfortunately, being a web application, it doesn't natively synchronize with mobile devices like Pocket PCs, Palm devices, or cell phones. If you want to do that, you'll need a 3rd-party application, like GooSync. GooSync is a little application that actually lives on your mobile device, and can synchronize to Google Calendar "over the air". This means that in the case of phones, it will connect to the internet and perform a synchronization, while Pocket PCs and Palm devices can use either a WiFi or phone data connection (if available), or the pass-through internet connection provided by ActiveSync or HotSync, respectively.
This concept is wonderful, and by many accounts works flawlessly. Unfortunately, after importing my massive Outlook calendar into Google Calendar, it turns out my Google Calendar account is somewhat of a challenge for synchronization tools. GooSync fails about 80% through the synchronization, but I'm not willing to pin that problem on them. I've also tried other applications that claim to be able to synchronize Google Calendar to tools like Outlook, and they fail as well.
Let us know in the comments if you've tried GooSync, and what your results are.
While there are severalmethods for syncing Google Calendar with Outlook or a Windows Mobile device, they tend to involve adding new software to the mix. Download Squad reader Dan sent us a nice tip for anyone who's not looking to synchronize calendars, but simply wants to use Google Calendar within Outlook.
All you have to do is right-click on the calendar tab in Outlook, click on Properties, and then go to the Home Page Tab. Check the button that says "Show home page by default for this folder," and then enter http://www.google.com/calendar. That's it. Now when you click the calendar tab in Outlook you'll see Google Calendar, and you can update it through Outlook or through any web browser when you're on the go. However, this method won't let you synchronize your calendar with a PDA--all it really does it replace Outlook's Calendar with a web page. If you uncheck this option, Outlook will revert back to its grayscale calendar and all your old appointments will show up again.
Here's a neat little utility with questionable usefulness and a less-than-intuitive UI - but, yes, it's neat. AmbientClock pulls appointments from your Google Calendar and maps them along a circular analog clock. You can also add a secondary calendar (such as that of a co-worker or spouse) for a visual representation of schedule conflicts.
So far, I can't really see what AmbientClock accomplishes that plain ol' Google Calendar doesn't, aside from the "oh crap look how little free time I have today, when am I going to eat?" factor. You can add it to your Google homepage, which I suppose is useful in the at-a-glance sense. However, browsing to future dates didn't work for me in Firefox 2.0. But since it's in beta, I'll cut it some slack.
Apparently, if all goes well, AmbientClock will soon be more than just a Google gadget - it'll be a standalone device. As in, an actual, three-dimensional product you can place on your desk!
After playing around with the user interface for a bit, which is sort of fun in and of itself, I decided to test the killer feature that puts Scrybe in a league of its own when it comes to online calendars and productivity applications: offline use and synchronization.
What can I say? It just works. I turned off my wireless adapter, put my browser into offline mode, logged in, and proceeded to add and change data in my Scrybe account. Everything worked as you'd expect - it felt like being online. Then I turned my wireless back on, put my browser back into online mode, logged into my account, and everything was there, as expected. Okay, so far, so good. So then, I moved over to another computer, and logged in to Scrybe. And, as expected, everything was there, as well. Perfect!
So what is there to complain about with the beta release? So far, surprisingly little. My one peeve is that the Scrybe window defaults to a specific size, which is slightly too long for my laptop's native resolution of 1280x800, and awkwardly short for my two available external monitor's resolutions at 1440x900 and 1280x1024. Given that Scrybe is written in Flash, as TechCrunch notes, it seems strange that they would have chosen not to make the interface fluid like, for example, Google Calendar. Certainly it should be possible. Let's hope this is on Scrybe's radar for future enhancements. For more thoughts on what it means that Scrybe is written in Flash, check out Ryan Stewart's thoughts at ZDNet.
I'm sure as time goes on bugs will be found, and fixed (oh, the beauty of online apps), but for now Scrybe is giving us a seriously strong first draft to play with. In terms of functionality, this beta release of Scrybe is almost feature complete, based on what they showed in the demonstration video. The only feature that did not make the cut for this version is the bookmarking / web clipping functionality. According to Scrybe this will be added in a few weeks, to be followed by the mysterious sharing functionality that is alluded to at the end of the first video.
Although I could take this time to walk through the functionality in Scrybe again, it's really no different than what we saw in the demo video, and I described in our first post about the system. That is to say that so far, everything works as I'd hoped it would.
Right now the only way to get a beta account is to sign up at Scrybe on their main page. Unfortunately for all of us excited users, Scrybe is doing a phased rollout of their beta program. Although this is frustrating for those of us that would like accounts and can't get them immediately, I think they deserve credit for deciding to do things right. Faizan, CEO and co-founder of Scrybe tells us "We could have launched with a bang and gotten another mega spike on Alexaholic, but the purpose is to control the hype and improve the product with focused users." That's a very refreshing perspective. For more information about the beta rollout, check out the Launch Details page on the Scrybe site.
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.
In this era of worshipping at the temple of "The David" (Getting Things Done), there is no shortage of offline and online productivity suites. With that in mind, I rarely get all that excited about the new Web 2.0 offerings that get a bit of buzz here and there. But Scrybe appears to be different.
Way different.
Like wow different. Here, just watch:
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Scrybe is an online organizer that is grounded in one word: context. The user interface is designed to always give the user context relating to the data they are dealing with. So if you're working in your calendar, you can fly up to a year view, or dig down all the way to a day view, and all of the related information is intelligently displayed so that you never lose track of where you are. Watching the video on their site, you immediately get a feeling of "that just makes sense". Google Calendar is good, but doesn't appear to be as good as this.
I'm going to start off by saying that I think Google Calendar rocks, and any online calendar is going to have to be something really special, and have some way cool features to come close to that online application. However, that doesn't stop me from investigating other calendar apps out there.
Spongecell is an online calendar that has a nice little addition called Spongebar. This unique bar allows you to type in a sentence like "sushi Friday at 8pm", dropping it instantly into the date and time you have specified. Calendars can be shared with friends, and you can view calendars from friends and contacts. Spongecell have also built an iPod Sync tool appropriately called SpongeSync. There is also an API that developers can utilize. Spongecell is a clean online calendar, that is easy to use, but besides that single feature, I personally can't see myself using it. Try out the online demo, and let us know your thoughts.
Ever notice that there's a missing feature on Facebook? Ok, it's not the ability to be able to add 5.001 friends. Get over it, nobody can have that many friends.
GMobileSync is a new program that allows you to sync your Windows Mobile PDA or Smartphone with Google Calendar. The free program is still in development, and right now, when I say "sync," I mean, download your Google Calendar to your device. 2-way syncing is expected in an update scheduled for release next week.
Google Calendar kicks some serious butt. Unfortunately, being a web application, it doesn't natively synchronize with mobile devices like Pocket PCs, Palm devices, or cell phones. If you want to do that, you'll need a 3rd-party application, like GooSync. GooSync is a little application that actually lives on your mobile device, and can synchronize to Google Calendar "over the air". This means that in the case of phones, it will connect to the internet and perform a synchronization, while Pocket PCs and Palm devices can use either a WiFi or phone data connection (if available), or the pass-through internet connection provided by ActiveSync or HotSync, respectively. 
All you have to do is right-click on the calendar tab in Outlook, click on Properties, and then go to the Home Page Tab. Check the button that says "Show home page by default for this folder," and then enter http://www.google.com/calendar. That's it. Now when you click the calendar tab in Outlook you'll see Google Calendar, and you can update it through Outlook or through any web browser when you're on the go. However, this method won't let you synchronize your calendar with a PDA--all it really does it replace Outlook's Calendar with a web page. If you uncheck this option, Outlook will revert back to its grayscale calendar and all your old appointments will show up again.
Here's a neat little utility with questionable usefulness and a less-than-intuitive UI - but, yes, it's neat. AmbientClock pulls appointments from your Google Calendar and maps them along a circular analog clock. You can also add a secondary calendar (such as that of a co-worker or spouse) for a visual representation of schedule conflicts.
You remember the video, right?
I'm going to start off by saying that I think Google Calendar rocks, and any online calendar is going to have to be something really special, and have some way cool features to come close to that online application. However, that doesn't stop me from investigating other calendar apps out there.
