About a month ago I decided it was time for me to bring a calendar into my life. It seems up until recently I have faired well with keeping everything organized in my head. And then a weekend came where I had three events to go to, which I had assumed were all on different nights (friday, saturday, sunday) and they all ended up being on the same night. No good.

I’m a Mac user by night and a PC user by day, so I couldn’t use one of the available desktop calendars. Believe me, I was tempted by iCal. We’ll see when the iPhone comes out. Anyhow, I decided to go with Google Calendar and I am very pleased for the most part. It’s extremely easy to use and does a nice job of allowing me to collaborate with others using the Google Calendar service.

Multiple Calendars - This is probably my favorite feature. I have a roster of freelance clients, a full time job, side projects, and a tiny little social life. I am able to break out the calendars by client, by project, and by job. It’s really nice to see it broken down like that and color coded.

Shared Calendars - For group projects I can create a calendar and have ownership of it, or if I am working with a group, it can be setup so they can create and edit events. This really helps at my job when people are scheduling, instead of sending me those ugly outlook invites, they can have my calendar on their google calendar. While it hasn’t quite happened to the level it could, there is huge potential here.

Notifications - One can get notifications for the many events that occur in the calendar. However, it seems at this point one can only subscribe to one of the calendars they create. I could be wrong, but I cannot seem to edit different notification types for different calendars. Hopefully someone comments and lets me know how to do it right. There is also an option to receive the day’s agenda via SMS if that is something you’d like.

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While this post is probably many months too late, and I am definitely late hopping on the Google Calendar bus, I am very impressed and can’t wait to see what people do with the Google Calendar API.

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