Month: April 2006

Album location: /photos/2006/2006-04-21_POTD/

I have tried out yet another calendaring web application – Google Calendar. I have to say that I liked it.

The user interface is pretty intuitive. There are daily, weekly, monthly views, and the agenda for a configurable number of days. Adding events can be done either through a traditional multi-field form or via very plain English text field (for example: “Beer with Nicos tomorrow 7:30pm at Chesters”). This last method is a pretty common feature for modern web calendars.

Notifications are supported via both popup windows and email messages. Setting things up is very flexible and easy. SMS notifications are coming soon.

What I really liked was that it is possible to create separate calendars.

You can have one for your personal stuff and another for your business meetings. And yet another one for holidays and events. And more. It is very easy to specify which calendars should be visible at any given moment. Each calendar can also be shared differently. There are three options for sharing – “private” (events will be totally hidden from everone), “public” (events will be fully visible by everyone, with all details), and “show free/busy times” (events are visible, but with minimum details). It is also possible to assign different rights to calendars on a per user basis.

Events can be easily copied and modified between calendars.

Calendars can be searched, linked and imported. It is extremely easy to add calendars of other people, both using Google Calendar, and others who export to iCal format (standard). This feature is very important. It makes it possible to include data from calendars maintained by other people. For example, I added a few calendars with Cyprus events (like Cyprus Rally calendar and upcoming.org events) and Cyprus holidays. By default, these other calendars are only linked to mine. So they can be updated by someone else, and I’ll see the changes too. If I wish to, though, I can easily copy events from any calenar to any other calendar (assuming I have enough access rights).

Export of any calendar data is available in both Atom feeds and iCal formats.

If you’re using any kind of calendaring software, give Google Calendar a try – it might be better than what you are using now. I’ll surely be playing around with it for the next few days.

If for some reason you want to have access to my calendars, here they are:

• Leonid Mamchenkov: iCal, XML (or you can use leonid@mamchenkov.net as friend’s email)
• Cyprus Holidays: iCal, XML (I entered all Cyprus public holidays for the year 2006, as Cyprus was missing from the list of supported countries)

There’s plenty of new stuff happening all around us. Technology gets a lot of hype on a 24×7 basis, with new things happening here and there. In this constantly updated environment it is sometimes difficult to notice the real pearls.

I think that I just came across one – JotSpot Family Site. It’s currently in Beta (as is half of the Web anyway), but it still offers a handful of interesting features.

The point of the JotSpot Family Site is to make family communications and information sharing easier. It provides an integrated environment with tools like calendar, poll system, blogs, recipes database, photo albums, family tree, etc. With these tools you can easily update your family members on recent happenings, share pictures, get birthday reminders, schedule family reunions, and do a lot of other cool stuff. All of these are provided free of charge (but that can change later, of course).

I’ve registered and played around with it and found it to be very intuitive. It is flexible enough without being difficult. Surely, it is rough around the edges and there are still a few bugs, but the direction and overall functionality are moving in the right direction.

I wish there was a way to switch user interface language. Currently the site is all in English, but most of my family speaks only Russian – and that’s pretty much the showstopper. I’d also appreciate some importing tools. Pictures should be integrated with Flickr, which is the de facto standard for image sharing. Calendar should also be able to read data from a variety of sources or formats. Blogging is too quite popular at the moment – I’d be glad to have posts from my personal blog appear on my family site (via the magic of RSS).

There are still ways to go and things to do. But I really liked the overall idea and the direction. Hopefully it will get some momentum and work out for the better.