this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

Google released the beta version of their calendar program and I have to say I’m quite impressed. That’s not to say that I’m not impressed with the other Google products, but Google continues to put quality ideas into a working Web 2.0 application.

Continuing with the typical Google interface that people are so accustomed, Google makes it easy to add and delete appointments as well as importing them from your previous calendar application.

The tabs on the right hand side make it easy to see views via day, week, month, next 4 days, and agenda options. One can easily add an appointment in any of the views just by clicking what time they want the appointment at or typing in what time the appointment should occur at.

Once the appointments are created, the user is able to drag the appointment around as well as expand and contract the box to change the amount of time for each event.

All of this is controlled via AJAX, which is used by Google in many of their Web 2.0 applications such as Google Maps and GMail.

Another nice feature is the ability to have alerts via Email and SMS. For me, since I have a Mac I use iCal as my calendar application of choice. Using iSync I am able to transfer all the data to my Treo. For the moment this is much more convenient for me and saves me the cost of text messaging.

Google makes it easy for people who already use Google’s Web 2.0 applications. The calendar program is just an extension of GMail where one can be even more organized.

Even though it is still in beta, it works quite well. I would like to see a year view if possible, similar to the month view by showing all 12 months. That’s more of a request than something that I feel is required in the application. In any case, another good product from the people at Google.