I love GMail, but I hate not having my calendar at my fingertips like I did with Outlook. Since I’ve made the switch to GMail for all of my different email accounts I’ve been really disorganized about appointments and schedules, and it’s all slamming together.
We just discovered this week that Sticks has two gigs at the same time on the same day — one in Goleta and one in San Diego. Obviously this is a problem for him. Now I know he should be managing his own calendar but since one of us still has to drive him it needs to be a group effort. Oh, and did I mention that Dancergirl also has a competition in Glendale on the same day?
This calendaring thing (or lack thereof) is out of control. I’ve been playing with some of the so-called Web 2.0 stuff, thinking that the group aspects would be handy. I started with Planzo calendar and it’s okay. I like getting my calendar via email and/or RSS for sure. What I don’t like is that there’s no way for me to color-code what ‘event’ belongs to who. It’s limited at this point to a “work” category.
Verizon recently partnered up with Yahoo!, so I figured maybe I’d try the Yahoo! calendar, too. It’s also okay, but no RSS feed which is really convenient to have. Still, I can get notices via SMS to my cell phone as well as email and if I used yahoo! messenger it would send it to that as well.
The thing is, none of them have all of what I want. Some are almost there, but are still missing key features. Outlook was the closest I ever got, but I’m trying to use a web-based app so that: 1) I can access it from the office or home computers without synching; and 2) I can get automatic notifications.
My ideal calendar would include being able to drag and drop emails onto it to link up email with appointments, being able to easily enter lots of dates and times — I could make an Excel spreadsheet or a text file in half the time it takes to enter everything separately (and these aren’t recurring, so I can’t use that feature), having color-coding for categories or people, have an RSS feed as well as SMS notifications and the ability to post appointments via email, like I can blog entries or Flickr photos from my cell phone.
Is there such a thing? If Google could invent that for GMail I’d be hooked. I’d PAY. If you have a favorite online calendar app, post a comment so I can give it a try.
Technorati Tags: calendar, web2.0, organization, planning
