Posts Tagged google-calendar
Introducing Google Calendar Labs
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on July 14th, 2009
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than three years since we introduced Google Calendar to the world. (It’s true, I just checked my calendar.) In that time we’ve received countless ideas and suggestions, including many from my fellow Googlers, and trying to decide which of those to build can be is difficult.
We try to balance usefulness and impact, but often that’s not enough. A feature may be useful to only a small handful of people, but to those folks it might be incredibly important. This is especially the case with some of our enterprise customers who are looking for ways to extend Calendar in highly specialized ways that would apply only to their employees.
We’ve been looking for a way to release early features to users in a quick and experimental fashion, but in a way that would let developers and customers outside of Google extend Calendar too. We’ve seen how successful Gmail Labs has been and decided Calendar deserved Labs too.
When you sign in to Calendar today, you’ll see a new page in Settings called Labs where, just like in Gmail, we’ll list new highly experimental features for you to try. (Those of you who use Google Apps at work or school will first need your domain admins to enable Labs by checking the “Turn on new features” box in Domain Settings.)
Today there are six new Labs features in the list and more on the way. Try out Next Meeting, which shows you how much time you have to procrastinate. Free or Busy allows you to see which of your friends or coworkers are currently in meetings. And World Clock lets you keep track of different timezones when you schedule meetings. And as with Gmail Labs, there’s a feedback link for you to discuss these features and to suggest new ones.
We’re also releasing an experimental API for you to build your own Calendar features, so if you’re a developer, check out this post at the Google Code Blog for more details.
Posted by David Marmaros, Software Engineer
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Introducing Google Calendar Labs
Google Calendar Gadgets Appearing
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on June 14th, 2009
Andrew Pariser emails in a surprise finding in Google Calendar (if by any chance you’re able to reproduce this – I’m not – please comment):
Opened up gcal today, to find an interesting new “Gadgets” link under the google logo. Clicking it opens a right side pane that introduces a gadgets menu and a selection of gadgets to choose from:
- Add Tasks
- Add Googler Search
- Add Jump to Date
- Add Next Meetings
- Add Time Zones
- Add Where Are My Friends?
I also have a nice “INTERNAL ONLY” tag at the top of this menu, even though I’m not and have never been a google employee. (…)
Most of the gadgets (tasks, jump to date, time zone) are pretty obvious. Next meetings shows the next event scheduled in your calendar. Googler search presumably allows me to search the employee database, although I think it’s disabled for me. Where are my friends allows you to add friends and it displays their availability information as decided by their google calendar (provided they keep this information publicly viewable).
[Thanks Andrew and Tony!]
Update: As noted in the comments, you can try disable all CSS on the page (e.g. in Firefox, hit View → Page Style → No Style), then click “Gadgets” to the right, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Now you may see the text “INTERNAL ONLY”. Clicking in these parts of the page will lead to (supposedly internal but accessible) feedback forms, or (inaccessible from the outside) Google intranet pages.
The source of the Google employee search widget, “Googler Search” (facewall.xml), is also available, albeit it probably only runs from within Google. For instance, thumbnails for the search are stored at https://moma-api.corp.google.com/[prefix]/thumb (where prefix is an employees name as appearing in their email). The server search returns a JSON profile of an employee, and the codename “Woodstock” appears (perhaps denoting the Google intranet info API, I’m not sure).
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Google Calendar Gadgets Appearing
Google Spreadsheets Data Validation
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on February 19th, 2009
Google Spreadsheets, part of Google Docs , has a new feature: cell content validation. For instance, you can select a column which is supposed to contain email addresses only
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Google Spreadsheets Data Validation
Sync Google Calendar and Contacts with Mobile Devices
Posted by Hassan Alsheikh in Articles on February 10th, 2009
A number of official Google blogs have just announced that Google Sync – a way of synchronizing your Google Calendars and Contacts with mobile devices – is now available for iPhone and Windows Mobile, and that other devices which support SyncML can also use Google Sync, but only for contacts. Google Sync, which was previously only available for Blackberry devices, uses “push” technology, which means that any online updates made to either your Google Account or Google Apps account – if your administrator has enabled the “Google Sync” option in the Mobile dashboard – are pushed to your device within minutes using your mobile data plan, rather than having to either dock your device to sync with your desktop applications or check Google’s servers for updates every few minutes like POP3 and IMAP mail accounts
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Sync Google Calendar and Contacts with Mobile Devices