After much talks and rumours of the possibility of Google coming up with a calendar application, Google Calendar is finally here. Google recently announced the new offering right about when buzz about a possible google calendar app was dying down. From the announcement, we can see that Google is serious with creating usable and useful web applications, regardless of the AJAX and Web 2.0 hype. The annnouncement highlighted the following:

• A fast interface - The app’s creators did away with requiring us to fill up forms when we’d rather just type in one line of information. Calendar is even integrated with Gmail, so you can add entries from events mentioned in Gmail messages.
• Calendar sharing - Google gave us the option of sharing our calendar with friends and contacts. We can also view our friends’ public events easily!
• Invitations and alerts - Calendar allows for alerts via email or SMS. Users can even invite friends to events even without their having Google Calendar.
• Standards compliance - Google Calendar can import from comma-separated tables (CSV) exported from Microsoft Outlook or from Apple’s iCal. Calendar even supports RSS so you can subscribe to your own or your friends’ calendars via your favorite feed reader.

What we like about Google calendar

We really dig the AJAX interface, and that’s not just because AJAX is a hot concept in web design and development today. Use of AJAX mans we can just simply click on a date and time to create an entry, and that we can drag around an existing event to change the time or duration. All this can be done without having to refresh the browser page. And information is also updated real-time, so if a friend is currently editing his calendar, you get to see updates if you’re also currently have his calendar in view.

The Gmail integration is also good, but we’ve yet to see this in action in our Gmail accounts (Google says upgrading is not instant across all accounts). But users can actually sign up even without having a Gmail account, so this is all right.

Some gripes

The ability to import CSV and iCal calendares is great. XML and iCal output is also cool. But for those who primarily use Windows and Microsoft Outlook, much is still needed in terms of synchronization. Yes, you can import and export across Google Calendar and Outlook, but it’s such a pain to have to do this all the time. It would be great if Google could come up with an automatic way to have one’s calendar sync up with Outlook, and even better, with a PDA-phone (such as a Windows-based SmartPhone, a Palm, or a BlackBerry).

Gripes aside, we say Google Calendar is a welcome app, indeed! We hope to see more developments of this “beta” release soon.