I’ve been planning our SE Asia / India trip without a calendar. iCal just doesn’t do it for me. too ridged. to 5 years ago. and even if I keep my calendar synced between computers, every time I move from the office to home I have to manually sync. pain. So, today, I fired up Google Calendar, looking to have one place online to organize the various legs of my trip.
The app is beautifully designed and simple as can be. At first it seems like the best solution, but as I started adding things like Airline dates and such, using this app quickly became a nightmare. I’m sure most of the problems I encountered are because I’m using the (outdated, almost pre-historic and certainly on it’s last legs) Safari. In a calendar app, 90% of your time is spent in the “event details” HUD, adding dates, times, notifications, meta data etc… This is where the meat of the app is. And it’s for this very reason that Google Calendar was giving me such a headache:
When I try to edit the time, if I choose “4:30pm” from the popup time picker, all is well. If I choose to add the date manually as “4:28pm” the application automatically reverts the time to “4:28am”. If I then type in “1628″, the app happily converts the number to “4:28pm”, nice. It took me about a half hour of wrestling with the app to figure this out.
It’s not so much of a deal killer, but a definite hiccup in the app, when one of the main focuses of the site is such a pain in the ass. Try adding dates and times for 8 flights over a 2 month span. Once you figure out the work around, Google Calendar becomes a pleasure to use again, especially with the “agenda” view, nice touch and particularly useful for us trip planning peoples. Now if I only I could get the app to register an event that goes from 4:40pm 2/10/06 to 12:50pm 2/10/06 (our flight from Hongkong to LA), but I guess I can’t ask for everything.
Or you can just say screw it and upgrade your backpack account to use the backpack calendar, which is the most wonderful piece of minimalist software ever.
