stuff is cool

So the hip new Web 2.0 thing to do these days is to have a flashy AJAX-ified web calendar, and Google is, of course, no exception. Today they officially launched Google Calendar, and although performance has been a bit spotty throughout the day, all in all I’m pretty happy with what they’ve got.

Now, Google is actually a bit of a late-comer to the game. I’d taken brief looks at Yahoo! Calendar, 30 Boxes, and the google-wannabe lookalike that is Planzo, but none of them really compelled me to use them. Yahoo!’s interface is a bit too cluttered (as usual), and the other two would have required too much work to get everything set up. Google’s is nice because (and I say this through gnashed teeth) it’s integrated with everything else Google has. When searching for other people’s calendars, it already has all my GMail contacts in there. When inviting others, it already has all my GMail contacts in there. When looking at an event, there’s a link with a map to the event which uses Google Maps/Local. It can send you reminders to your GMail account for when an event comes up. And, as an added bonus, it can send you an SMS message as a reminder if you choose - I’m currently awaiting my “activation code” to get these working. All in all, it’s pretty feature-complete.

So, I’ve been spending the relatively slow morning spending time playing with Google Calendar and adding events. I’ve set up my own separate calendar for my ultimate stuff, and I’ve added a few calendars just for fun: like the calendar with all the episodes of 24 on it, and the 2006 Astros schedule calendar. I must say that it’s nice that I can turn these on/off at will, to reduce clutter.

And lastly, I just noticed that if you click on the “print” icon, it makes a PDF for you. Very cool