7 ms·

A new day for Google Calendar

357 points by aren55555 12y ago

mholt 12y ago
Finally. I feel like the current Calendar app has been stuck in 2009. It looks like this new one is actually designed for use on small screens.
- ssully 12y ago
  Agreed! Its been even more noticeable lately with Google rolling out material design updates for their apps the last few months.
- pcurve 12y ago
  Agreed. Also I hope they improved recurring tasks and reminder, because the current one is bad.
- twistedpair 12y ago
  Calendars on mobile phones are a hard design problem. We're used to large calendars the size of well... a wall calendar. Try making that 3" wide and you can't show all the days and information and you either (1) make things too small (GS4 Cal app) or (2) make it a swipe fest. This is probably the reason they didn't address the design previously.
  - r00fus 12y ago
    It's not like it's not a widely addressed problem - look at FantastiCal and other calendar apps - lots of very cool design ideas to deal with the limited space.
- fudged71 12y ago
  The desktop calendar is far behind. I'm moving to Sunrise desktop calendar until they put out a big update (someday).
abhishekmdb 12y ago
And a bad news from google Google is watching you if you have enabled Data Compression Proxy in new Chrome for Android and iOS, http://www.techworm.net/2014/11/data-compression-proxy-new-chrome.html http://www.techworm.net/2014/11/data-compression-proxy-new-c...
- amaks 12y ago
  This is a slight offtopic, perhaps worthy a separate HN post?
  - abhishekmdb 12y ago
    i am not sure i just tried but its not showing up
    - amaks 12y ago
      I meant you should just create a new post on HN.
  - abhishekmdb 12y ago
    i dnt know i tried after u said but its not showing up in "new"
- watty 12y ago
  What does this have to do with the new Calendar app?
- chc 12y ago
  Are you unfamiliar with the concept of a proxy or what? Any proxy can see the stuff you pass through it.
amaks 12y ago
Unfortunately web version has not been updated.
- johngd 12y ago
  I second this. I cannot wait for the day where I don't second guess myself whether I want to put an event in my company's MSExchange calendar, or google calendar because I don't know if I will see it if saved to the latter.
- enobrev 12y ago
  Not sure if this applies, but I got the web version of Inbox about 2 days after I installed the Inbox app on my phone. Ideally they'll release the web version soon after as well.
- kolev 12y ago
  The web-based version is way too outdated. Given Inbox was written using the newest GWT, and I assume Calendar is using an older version, maybe it won't be such a big deal to refresh that, too.
msoad 12y ago
I loved the "meaningful animation"[1] for location pin after you create an event. At first I thought Material Design is a lot of buzz words with not much innovation but when I read the docs I realized they put a lot of thoughts behind it. [1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-transitions.html http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-trans...
- emehrkay 12y ago
  I like it too. Reminds me of of the pin drop on apple/google maps when you find a location (or just about any other action done on an OS X machine). Sidenote: you people on the "tech internet" use the word innovation too much
- jobu 12y ago
  Their assists animation looks interesting, but I will wait to judge until I can actually try it. The Apple calendar looks great, but feels really clunky to add and edit events. (Especially on a Mac!) For pure usability, I haven't found a calendar program that beats MS Outlook running on Windows.
  - eridius 12y ago
    Can you elaborate on what you mean by "clunky"? I haven't noticed any issues adding or editing events, in either OS X or iOS's Calendar apps. Also note that Yosemite added event suggestions when adding new events to the OS X Calendar app (but I don't believe iOS added anything like that for the iOS app). I haven't had a chance to experiment with it yet (since I primarily do event entry in iOS), but it looks pretty straightforward.
- andreyf 12y ago
  Consistent choreography. Do: Direct user attention with coordinated, orderly motion. Don't: Don’t confuse users with inconsistent or disorderly motion and objects leaving/entering in seemingly random directions. This seems like a strange hard rule to follow. The disorganized demo has a very different "feel" to it that might be appropriate in some places more than others.
jesperhh 12y ago
But you still cannot post simple HTML or RTF into the web version..
matmann2001 12y ago
So first we have a new Gmail app, and now a new Google Calendar app. What's the roadmap here? Is Google going to roll out new versions of their other apps? Do they plan to maintain both apps in parallel, and for how long? Is this just an experiment or do they plan to convert all users to the new apps eventually?
- knicholes 12y ago
  I'm betting that this has something to do with deprecating GWT and supporting AngularJS.
  - StevePerkins 12y ago
    Putting aside the fact that GWT 3.0 is about to come out... neither Gmail nor Google Calendar even use GWT. Like the overwhelming majority of Google's real-world web apps, they're primarily based on Closure Tools. GWT is only used in a handful of places these days, the most significant being Google Maps (assuming they didn't remove that during the last rewrite). Despite being famously "backed by Google", I'm not sure about how many real-world Google properties actually use Angular yet. Most actual Google web apps still very much revolve around a technology stack from 5 years ago. Do as I say, not as I do... Regardless, what does the JavaScript library for their web apps have to do with their native mobile apps?
    - cromwellian 12y ago
      Inbox is about 70% GWT code, 30% Closure. The new Calendar uses the same architecture as Inbox, read into that what you will. Google Sheets uses GWT in much the same way as Inbox. Then there's AdWords, Google Shopping Expression, Flights, Hotels, Android Play Console, Google Wallet, Google Groups, and a bunch of new apps coming up. There are 3,000 engineers internally using GWT, and we record 150,000 monthly active unique users hitting our SDK update servers. Last time I checked, about 20,000 unique domains use GWT. Apple (iAds Workspace), Amazon (AWS Console), Nike, etc use GWT. Google Maps has never used GWT, although there were internal prototypes. As to what this has to do with native mobile apps, it has a lot. We have built separate Hybrid apps. Hybrid not in the sense of PhoneGap, but in the sense that we mix native code and cross-compiled Java together. Inbox has a core set of client side (non-UI) logic representing about 70% of the code base. This is written in Java. GWT is used to cross-compile this code into a library for the Web, it is type-annotated with JsDoc, and then the remaining UI code is done with Closure. This gives us cross-language type-checking and optimization (Closure will flag as error if JS->Java or Java->JS calls are wrong) j2objc is used to cross-compile the shared code into Objective-C for iOS. The remaining portion (UI critical code) is done with traditional XCode toolchain. For GWT Users who are interested, I am giving a deeper presentation on GMail's Inbox architecture at this year's GWT.create conference (http://gwtcreate.com/ http://gwtcreate.com/).
PMan74 12y ago
> Posted by Ian Leader, Product Manager Nominative determinism in action folks
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >> Posted by Ian Leader, Product Manager >Nominative determinism in action folks Selection|Reporting|Sampling bias in action folks. ;0)
- twic 12y ago
  What? No, Google renames all its senior employees according to their function now.
  - smacktoward 12y ago
    I wonder if he's related to Jennifer Government (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government)...
    - jmsbtlr111 12y ago
      A guy at my uni graduated this year with an electrical engineering degree. His name is literally Zeus Engineer... (proof: http://nz.gradconnection.com/universities/university-of-auckland/zeus_engineer/633748/ http://nz.gradconnection.com/universities/university-of-auck... )
- organsnyder 12y ago
  His name precluded him from his first career choice of copy editing.
- archagon 12y ago
  John Calendar must be feeling pretty crappy right about now.
kruk 12y ago
Looking forward to iOS app. Already store all contacts and calendar on Google servers, might as well use their app.
mey 12y ago
Still no support for Windows app store it looks like.
- guardian5x 12y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted. I would like to see Google to support Windows Store. Offering the best possible cross-platform support ist definately not evil.
netrus 12y ago
It seems I do not really have to hope my vendor will provide an Android update for my phone, as Google distributes most cool new stuff using the app ecosystem. As with Inbox, I think Google is finally generating sufficient pressure on developers and businesses to use meta-data for their mails and websites. I appreciate that. If their text parser for stuff like locations and times works for non-english texts, I'll be a super happy user!
- haubey 12y ago
  The flip-side to this is that the Android versions of these apps aren't getting anymore love. Messages is now Hangouts, Browser is now Chrome, Calender is now GCal. I heard that the Gmail app is going to start allowing Yahoo email accounts too. Android is much more locked down than it once was.
  - myko 12y ago
    Except AOSP Email was updated in Lollipop, as was Messenger.
    - lstamour 12y ago
      And there's a browser app again in L too...
lnanek2 12y ago
I'd be happy if they stopped trying to be fancy and just covered usability basics like supporting the browser back button. I can't even count the number of times I've hit back on an event screen expecting to get to my calendar view and left the calendar site entirely. Yes, there's a fancy JavaScript button that works that I could take ten times longer to trigger, but that's not good practice to force users to use your internal JS only navigation solution.
- orbitur 12y ago
  1. The post is referring to a new Android app, not the web UI. 2. The situation you're talking about has existed since... well, it's been there for the last 3 years I've been using Google Calendar. I, too, would like a working back button, but the web UI is effectively set in stone.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - ImJasonH 12y ago
    The back button issue in the web UI was fixed recently.
    - orbitur 12y ago
      You've blown my mind. I feel like I was hitting the back button from an event detail and landing on the New Tab page very recently. Thanks for pointing it out.
- tmhedberg 12y ago
  Agreed that the back button issue was annoying for a long time. Fortunately, the fix went live last week!
- nevir 12y ago
  http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/30/google-calendar-now-updates-events-in-real-time-and-finally-supports-the-browsers-back-button/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/30/google-calendar-now-update...
jayshahtx 12y ago
I wrote my senior thesis on a calendar assistant that achieves much of the functionality mentioned here (recommending times/places, auto updates, etc) and lost so much motivation just to the sheer amount of integration between parties/services required to solve this problem. There has been a lot of work in the academic space on optimizing calendar/email functions but its challenging to implement across so many email providers/clients. I'm glad Google is taking a step in this direction, I'm not confident many startups would be able to solve this problem effectively.
- cbhl 12y ago
  One thing that helps is if you can convince email senders to put in custom markup with the required metadata: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/highlights https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/highlights
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  >> "I'm not confident many startups would be able to solve this problem effectively." Take a look at Sunrise. They're doing a pretty good job I think.
pradn 12y ago
Adding events from emails is nice, but I'd love to be able to add an event from taking a picture of a poster or a flyer. I see ads for concerts, rallies, art exhibits, and so on whenever I'm walking around town or visiting the local library. I'd love to just snap a picture and have the details uploaded to my calendar.
- sounds 12y ago
  A QR code should be sufficient.
  - pradn 12y ago
    But this requires every poster creator to add an ugly QR code. Plus, QR codes just take you to a website and then you have to add info to your calendar manually. Bonus points if they support .ics but that's rare.
    - GotenXiao 12y ago
      No, you can create a QR code that encodes a calendar event. See example: http://imgur.com/117Jn9D http://imgur.com/117Jn9D
duaneb 12y ago
Finally, a calendar app for ios. The current options are terrible across the board.
- boiler_up800 12y ago
  Yes! I am super excited about this. I currently use the mobile website as an app on the home screen and the experience is not great.
ou812 12y ago
Still doesn't have a month view with legible event labels? Not sure why they can't do this, the default Calendar app that ships with Samsung phones pulls it off beautifully.
buzzkills 12y ago
I wonder if it works for domain accounts. Most things don't seem to for some time.
- porges 12y ago
  Given that it is now more than 2 years since Gmail cards were released for Google Now, and there's still no sign of them arriving for Apps accounts... I'd say no.
- tdicola 12y ago
  It works for my domain/apps account on a Nexus 9.
Pro_bity 12y ago
And another reason to switch to Android.
acalendar 12y ago
When will google's calendar app have CalDav. It shocks me that the default calendar for android does not interoperate with any calendar server except gmail's (unless you can shoe-horn events in with a separate caldav app.)
- Nullabillity 12y ago
  Their calendar on the web can both import and export iCalendar feeds. I'm not sure about automatically writing back updates though.
  - acalendar 12y ago
    The Gmail Web Calendar has many good features I agree. But, the Android Calendar would be much better if it would work with other calendar servers besides Gmail. If google called the Android Calendar the Gmail Calendar App, it would be more appropriate. But, this current default android calendar app doesn't use the CalDav protocol and only works with the gmail calendar. This is very peculiar behavior and not what I'd expect from google.
    - keeperofdakeys 12y ago
      I've got a number of .ical calendars added to the web interface, and all of them both appear on my phone, and get updated without me going to the web interface. I'm not sure if my device retrieves them, or whether google's servers do it for me (probably the latter). It would be handy to have a full calendar app though.
bruceboughton 12y ago
What a terrible advert. I couldn't focus on the features being demoed because they were on screen so fleetingly and the background scenes were so distracting. They're trying to imitate Apple's adverts but completely blow it by showing overcomplicated interactions.
eslaught 12y ago
I'm a little worried that this is introducing a new vector for spam. I have already been getting spam through invites (where they get auto-added to my calendar even before I have a chance to see what they are). Frankly, I want my calendar to be a private calendar. I don't want to share it, or receive invites through it, or auto-add events just because I got an email. I'm still happy to have the sync capability, because I use a smartphone, but aside from that I really have no use cases which require my calendar to be online at all. Admittedly, this may just be a case where Google's interests are not aligned with my own. If so, are there (real, viable) alternatives?
- gmcabrita 12y ago
  >I have already been getting spam through invites (where they get auto-added to my calendar even before I have a chance to see what they are). Fortunately you can turn this off in the Google Calendar settings. This way they only get added to your calendar if you accept.
- lern_too_spel 12y ago
  You could already add events to somebody's calendar by sending them an invite, and you could already mark events as spam. I don't see what's new here.
- timcraft 12y ago
  http://calendaz.com http://calendaz.com (disclaimer: I made it) I wanted a private calendar without sharing/invites too, so I ended up building my own (do not recommend unless you have a lot of time on your hands!). No spam, no ads, you own your data. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about it.
d0m 12y ago
I won't lie, I'm starting to become a google fanboy again thanks to the beautiful google material design experience. Hats off to the team behind this new calendar app.
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  It's interesting how, as Apple's design sensibility gets more and more questionable with the recent changes to iOS and OSX, google appears to be finally paying due respect to good design and really putting the work in. And it's paying off, big time.
  - fidotron 12y ago
    In the sense that it's annoying a lot of Android users, it certainly is paying off. What the current Android leadership simply don't understand is that there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS, not because they couldn't afford it. iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening, since if people wanted the iOS experience they might as well get the real thing. Design fascism works when you're in a niche, but will never be mass market. Windows Phone is similarly lauded in design circles but mysteriously fails to sell, and this is why. The crowds praising all these "improvements" are the sort of people that actually thought Windows Mobile was not only tolerable, but a good idea. My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch, and they aren't too concerned about existing users, but the side effect of this is that all of the major smartphone OSs have reached the same level of out-of-touch ness that we had prior to the original iPhone coming along.
    - gtaylor 12y ago
      > My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch Huh? I've been an Android user since the days of the Moto Droid, and I really like the design direction they're taking. It's clean, it's not full of crappy, drastic gradients and obscene amounts of clutter. Some of the menus/lists are organized better now, which I greatly appreciate. The Music app is actually bearable now. The Gmail app is better than ever for my usage cases. The only thing that annoys me is the new Message app removing the ability to swipe convos off when you are "done" with them. But that's a small little annoyance to get all of the other goodies. I'm sure there are others that hate it, but it's not like everyone does. I'm more satisfied with my phone now than I've ever been.
tspike 12y ago
Good grief, they sure are desperate to turn their most useful apps into activity streams. The day I have to scroll past an ad to check an appointment is the day I stop using Calendar.
maho 12y ago
My employer (German) just banned all Google products (except search) for work-related things, due to privacy issues. Reading Google's latest terms-and-conditions, this move is somewhat understandable, given the strong privacy laws that German companies and institutions have to follow. On the other hand, I guess that scanning a large amount of emails is the precise thing that allows them to offer robust email-to-event conversion. But I wish that this sort of thing would work locally (on the cellphone or computer in question), not on a remote server somewhere.
- andybak 12y ago
  It will be interesting to see if in years to come we'll look at Germany's policy as overly cautious and a net loss or extraordinarily prescient. I'm genuinely on the fence on this one. I'm rather cavalier on privacy issues (at least where they affect my own person) and quite happy with the goodies I receive in return. However I sometimes wonder how I'll feel with the benefit of hindsight.
  - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    I meet quite a few people talking about moving their tech infrastructure away from US controlled cloud services. I may live in a bubble, but it would be interesting to see some data on intentions in EU companies about this.
    - fidotron 12y ago
      Not just in the EU - I hear this a lot in Canada too. My use of their services was even considered a red flag on a recent consulting gig. Another odd case I ran into is parents trying to prevent their children getting into the Google ecosystem until they're mid-teen level. This is manifesting in resistance to their education stuff being adopted by schools.
      - lstamour 12y ago
        I used to think that it was important to protect data from being stored in the US .... until the NSA leaks and the realisation that Canada is a Five Eyes member rendered it effectively moot. Now I'm simply more worried about theft or spying by non-government third-parties -- the security in place rather than the laws that apply to the service provider. But that's just me.
alphakappa 12y ago
I watched the video twice and I still can't figure out what the changes are about because I kept getting distracted by all the stuff happening in the background. Even after I purposely tried to focus on the device UI, I couldn't process all of it in any coherent way. Please don't make promo videos that leave me with no sense of the product you are trying to demo.
legohead 12y ago
cute video. I have no idea what the new calendar does.
pinaceae 12y ago
personnally i can't stand calendar views that do not show empty stretches of time - it is important info to me if i DON'T have anything coming up in the next two hours. i can see this at a glance in classic calendars. i cannot in this agenda/stream view. yay, progress.
- patbuchanan 12y ago
  Agreed - that's what I'm checking on the majority of the time myself.
obviouslygreen 12y ago
I've been using and (for the most part) promoting Android ever since the G1... but after 2.x the rate of UI change has, in my opinion, been terrible from a usability experience. Pretty much all software (whether that's apps, websites, programming languages, or anything else) past a certain complexity has quirks. Getting used to the quirks is part of learning the software. Massively changing large swathes of your built-in software is bad for users! I get that it'd be suicide to say "OK, permanent feature freeze... now," but big changes to the UI on apps that are (to many normal users) fundamental to using Android break the user's understanding of their use, often amounting to months of acclimation down the drain. It's very frustrating.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I too have been using Android since the G1 (I still have it for testing on!) and I would agree that the introduction of new paradigms/ways of interacting with apps (seemingly introduced every I/O every year) is frustrating. The hamburger menu is in fashion. Then it isn't. Swiping from the left is, then it isn't. All of the examples in their design spec of how NOT to do things was precisely what they did on 2.x. I know you have to be seen to be "innovating" for attention-deficit new phone buyers, but living in a world of constantly shifting sands just means it's hard to see from all the dust blowing around in your face.
  - jordanthoms 12y ago
    I don't see it the same way - Android's been behind the other smartphone operating systems in UI quality, and has had to iterate quickly in 2.x, 4.x and 5 in order to catch up. As they reach a point where Android has as good or better user interface as the competition (I think they're close to that now), the rate of change will most likely slow down.
    - iaskwhy 12y ago
      Also, it's a kind of new field for ergonomics and usability so all these changes (both hardware and software-wise) are something to be expected.
malkia 12y ago
Is there any 3rd party product that can sync gmail with apple's calendar? I have google phone/Chromebook, and my wife - iPhone/OSX. So I haven't really looked, but we were thinking of starting to use more and more the calender to sync up with things we need to do. Any recommendations?
- kevruger 12y ago
  I don't think you need any 3rd party products. I use an iPhone, an Android phone for work and use a Macbook Pro and my main calendar is my Gmail Google calendar which syncs among all 3 devices without any 3rd party software. I guess you may just need to know how to set it up on iOS and Mac products.
kentosi 12y ago
One thing I dearly miss from when Google Calendar first came out was the ability to type in text to create an event. Eg - Typing "Dinner tomorrow at 7:30pm at Foobar restaurant" would automatically create an event with the correct lexical components. It looks like they're finally reintroducing this back.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
_acme 12y ago
How does one use the task component of google calendar on an iOS device? How are google keep's tasks integrated with my google calendar?

357 points by aren55555 12y ago

mholt 12y ago

Finally. I feel like the current Calendar app has been stuck in 2009. It looks like this new one is actually designed for use on small screens.

ssully 12y ago
Agreed! Its been even more noticeable lately with Google rolling out material design updates for their apps the last few months.
pcurve 12y ago
Agreed. Also I hope they improved recurring tasks and reminder, because the current one is bad.
twistedpair 12y ago
Calendars on mobile phones are a hard design problem. We're used to large calendars the size of well... a wall calendar. Try making that 3" wide and you can't show all the days and information and you either (1) make things too small (GS4 Cal app) or (2) make it a swipe fest. This is probably the reason they didn't address the design previously.
- r00fus 12y ago
  It's not like it's not a widely addressed problem - look at FantastiCal and other calendar apps - lots of very cool design ideas to deal with the limited space.
fudged71 12y ago
The desktop calendar is far behind. I'm moving to Sunrise desktop calendar until they put out a big update (someday).

abhishekmdb 12y ago

And a bad news from google Google is watching you if you have enabled Data Compression Proxy in new Chrome for Android and iOS, http://www.techworm.net/2014/11/data-compression-proxy-new-chrome.html http://www.techworm.net/2014/11/data-compression-proxy-new-c...

amaks 12y ago
This is a slight offtopic, perhaps worthy a separate HN post?
- abhishekmdb 12y ago
  i am not sure i just tried but its not showing up
  - amaks 12y ago
    I meant you should just create a new post on HN.
- abhishekmdb 12y ago
  i dnt know i tried after u said but its not showing up in "new"
watty 12y ago
What does this have to do with the new Calendar app?
chc 12y ago
Are you unfamiliar with the concept of a proxy or what? Any proxy can see the stuff you pass through it.

amaks 12y ago

Unfortunately web version has not been updated.

johngd 12y ago
I second this. I cannot wait for the day where I don't second guess myself whether I want to put an event in my company's MSExchange calendar, or google calendar because I don't know if I will see it if saved to the latter.
enobrev 12y ago
Not sure if this applies, but I got the web version of Inbox about 2 days after I installed the Inbox app on my phone. Ideally they'll release the web version soon after as well.
kolev 12y ago
The web-based version is way too outdated. Given Inbox was written using the newest GWT, and I assume Calendar is using an older version, maybe it won't be such a big deal to refresh that, too.

msoad 12y ago

I loved the "meaningful animation"[1] for location pin after you create an event. At first I thought Material Design is a lot of buzz words with not much innovation but when I read the docs I realized they put a lot of thoughts behind it. [1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-transitions.html http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-trans...

emehrkay 12y ago
I like it too. Reminds me of of the pin drop on apple/google maps when you find a location (or just about any other action done on an OS X machine). Sidenote: you people on the "tech internet" use the word innovation too much
jobu 12y ago
Their assists animation looks interesting, but I will wait to judge until I can actually try it. The Apple calendar looks great, but feels really clunky to add and edit events. (Especially on a Mac!) For pure usability, I haven't found a calendar program that beats MS Outlook running on Windows.
- eridius 12y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by "clunky"? I haven't noticed any issues adding or editing events, in either OS X or iOS's Calendar apps. Also note that Yosemite added event suggestions when adding new events to the OS X Calendar app (but I don't believe iOS added anything like that for the iOS app). I haven't had a chance to experiment with it yet (since I primarily do event entry in iOS), but it looks pretty straightforward.
andreyf 12y ago
Consistent choreography. Do: Direct user attention with coordinated, orderly motion. Don't: Don’t confuse users with inconsistent or disorderly motion and objects leaving/entering in seemingly random directions. This seems like a strange hard rule to follow. The disorganized demo has a very different "feel" to it that might be appropriate in some places more than others.

jesperhh 12y ago

But you still cannot post simple HTML or RTF into the web version..

matmann2001 12y ago

So first we have a new Gmail app, and now a new Google Calendar app. What's the roadmap here? Is Google going to roll out new versions of their other apps? Do they plan to maintain both apps in parallel, and for how long? Is this just an experiment or do they plan to convert all users to the new apps eventually?

knicholes 12y ago
I'm betting that this has something to do with deprecating GWT and supporting AngularJS.
- StevePerkins 12y ago
  Putting aside the fact that GWT 3.0 is about to come out... neither Gmail nor Google Calendar even use GWT. Like the overwhelming majority of Google's real-world web apps, they're primarily based on Closure Tools. GWT is only used in a handful of places these days, the most significant being Google Maps (assuming they didn't remove that during the last rewrite). Despite being famously "backed by Google", I'm not sure about how many real-world Google properties actually use Angular yet. Most actual Google web apps still very much revolve around a technology stack from 5 years ago. Do as I say, not as I do... Regardless, what does the JavaScript library for their web apps have to do with their native mobile apps?
  - cromwellian 12y ago
    Inbox is about 70% GWT code, 30% Closure. The new Calendar uses the same architecture as Inbox, read into that what you will. Google Sheets uses GWT in much the same way as Inbox. Then there's AdWords, Google Shopping Expression, Flights, Hotels, Android Play Console, Google Wallet, Google Groups, and a bunch of new apps coming up. There are 3,000 engineers internally using GWT, and we record 150,000 monthly active unique users hitting our SDK update servers. Last time I checked, about 20,000 unique domains use GWT. Apple (iAds Workspace), Amazon (AWS Console), Nike, etc use GWT. Google Maps has never used GWT, although there were internal prototypes. As to what this has to do with native mobile apps, it has a lot. We have built separate Hybrid apps. Hybrid not in the sense of PhoneGap, but in the sense that we mix native code and cross-compiled Java together. Inbox has a core set of client side (non-UI) logic representing about 70% of the code base. This is written in Java. GWT is used to cross-compile this code into a library for the Web, it is type-annotated with JsDoc, and then the remaining UI code is done with Closure. This gives us cross-language type-checking and optimization (Closure will flag as error if JS->Java or Java->JS calls are wrong) j2objc is used to cross-compile the shared code into Objective-C for iOS. The remaining portion (UI critical code) is done with traditional XCode toolchain. For GWT Users who are interested, I am giving a deeper presentation on GMail's Inbox architecture at this year's GWT.create conference (http://gwtcreate.com/ http://gwtcreate.com/).

PMan74 12y ago

> Posted by Ian Leader, Product Manager Nominative determinism in action folks

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>> Posted by Ian Leader, Product Manager >Nominative determinism in action folks Selection|Reporting|Sampling bias in action folks. ;0)
twic 12y ago
What? No, Google renames all its senior employees according to their function now.
- smacktoward 12y ago
  I wonder if he's related to Jennifer Government (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government)...
  - jmsbtlr111 12y ago
    A guy at my uni graduated this year with an electrical engineering degree. His name is literally Zeus Engineer... (proof: http://nz.gradconnection.com/universities/university-of-auckland/zeus_engineer/633748/ http://nz.gradconnection.com/universities/university-of-auck... )
organsnyder 12y ago
His name precluded him from his first career choice of copy editing.
archagon 12y ago
John Calendar must be feeling pretty crappy right about now.

kruk 12y ago

Looking forward to iOS app. Already store all contacts and calendar on Google servers, might as well use their app.

mey 12y ago

Still no support for Windows app store it looks like.

guardian5x 12y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted. I would like to see Google to support Windows Store. Offering the best possible cross-platform support ist definately not evil.

netrus 12y ago

It seems I do not really have to hope my vendor will provide an Android update for my phone, as Google distributes most cool new stuff using the app ecosystem. As with Inbox, I think Google is finally generating sufficient pressure on developers and businesses to use meta-data for their mails and websites. I appreciate that. If their text parser for stuff like locations and times works for non-english texts, I'll be a super happy user!

haubey 12y ago
The flip-side to this is that the Android versions of these apps aren't getting anymore love. Messages is now Hangouts, Browser is now Chrome, Calender is now GCal. I heard that the Gmail app is going to start allowing Yahoo email accounts too. Android is much more locked down than it once was.
- myko 12y ago
  Except AOSP Email was updated in Lollipop, as was Messenger.
  - lstamour 12y ago
    And there's a browser app again in L too...

lnanek2 12y ago

I'd be happy if they stopped trying to be fancy and just covered usability basics like supporting the browser back button. I can't even count the number of times I've hit back on an event screen expecting to get to my calendar view and left the calendar site entirely. Yes, there's a fancy JavaScript button that works that I could take ten times longer to trigger, but that's not good practice to force users to use your internal JS only navigation solution.

orbitur 12y ago
1. The post is referring to a new Android app, not the web UI. 2. The situation you're talking about has existed since... well, it's been there for the last 3 years I've been using Google Calendar. I, too, would like a working back button, but the web UI is effectively set in stone.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ImJasonH 12y ago
  The back button issue in the web UI was fixed recently.
  - orbitur 12y ago
    You've blown my mind. I feel like I was hitting the back button from an event detail and landing on the New Tab page very recently. Thanks for pointing it out.
tmhedberg 12y ago
Agreed that the back button issue was annoying for a long time. Fortunately, the fix went live last week!
nevir 12y ago
http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/30/google-calendar-now-updates-events-in-real-time-and-finally-supports-the-browsers-back-button/ http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/30/google-calendar-now-update...

jayshahtx 12y ago

I wrote my senior thesis on a calendar assistant that achieves much of the functionality mentioned here (recommending times/places, auto updates, etc) and lost so much motivation just to the sheer amount of integration between parties/services required to solve this problem. There has been a lot of work in the academic space on optimizing calendar/email functions but its challenging to implement across so many email providers/clients. I'm glad Google is taking a step in this direction, I'm not confident many startups would be able to solve this problem effectively.

cbhl 12y ago
One thing that helps is if you can convince email senders to put in custom markup with the required metadata: https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/highlights https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/highlights
k-mcgrady 12y ago
>> "I'm not confident many startups would be able to solve this problem effectively." Take a look at Sunrise. They're doing a pretty good job I think.

pradn 12y ago

Adding events from emails is nice, but I'd love to be able to add an event from taking a picture of a poster or a flyer. I see ads for concerts, rallies, art exhibits, and so on whenever I'm walking around town or visiting the local library. I'd love to just snap a picture and have the details uploaded to my calendar.

sounds 12y ago
A QR code should be sufficient.
- pradn 12y ago
  But this requires every poster creator to add an ugly QR code. Plus, QR codes just take you to a website and then you have to add info to your calendar manually. Bonus points if they support .ics but that's rare.
  - GotenXiao 12y ago
    No, you can create a QR code that encodes a calendar event. See example: http://imgur.com/117Jn9D http://imgur.com/117Jn9D

duaneb 12y ago

Finally, a calendar app for ios. The current options are terrible across the board.

boiler_up800 12y ago
Yes! I am super excited about this. I currently use the mobile website as an app on the home screen and the experience is not great.

ou812 12y ago

Still doesn't have a month view with legible event labels? Not sure why they can't do this, the default Calendar app that ships with Samsung phones pulls it off beautifully.

buzzkills 12y ago

I wonder if it works for domain accounts. Most things don't seem to for some time.

porges 12y ago
Given that it is now more than 2 years since Gmail cards were released for Google Now, and there's still no sign of them arriving for Apps accounts... I'd say no.
tdicola 12y ago
It works for my domain/apps account on a Nexus 9.

Pro_bity 12y ago

And another reason to switch to Android.

acalendar 12y ago

When will google's calendar app have CalDav. It shocks me that the default calendar for android does not interoperate with any calendar server except gmail's (unless you can shoe-horn events in with a separate caldav app.)

Nullabillity 12y ago
Their calendar on the web can both import and export iCalendar feeds. I'm not sure about automatically writing back updates though.
- acalendar 12y ago
  The Gmail Web Calendar has many good features I agree. But, the Android Calendar would be much better if it would work with other calendar servers besides Gmail. If google called the Android Calendar the Gmail Calendar App, it would be more appropriate. But, this current default android calendar app doesn't use the CalDav protocol and only works with the gmail calendar. This is very peculiar behavior and not what I'd expect from google.
  - keeperofdakeys 12y ago
    I've got a number of .ical calendars added to the web interface, and all of them both appear on my phone, and get updated without me going to the web interface. I'm not sure if my device retrieves them, or whether google's servers do it for me (probably the latter). It would be handy to have a full calendar app though.

bruceboughton 12y ago

What a terrible advert. I couldn't focus on the features being demoed because they were on screen so fleetingly and the background scenes were so distracting. They're trying to imitate Apple's adverts but completely blow it by showing overcomplicated interactions.

eslaught 12y ago

I'm a little worried that this is introducing a new vector for spam. I have already been getting spam through invites (where they get auto-added to my calendar even before I have a chance to see what they are). Frankly, I want my calendar to be a private calendar. I don't want to share it, or receive invites through it, or auto-add events just because I got an email. I'm still happy to have the sync capability, because I use a smartphone, but aside from that I really have no use cases which require my calendar to be online at all. Admittedly, this may just be a case where Google's interests are not aligned with my own. If so, are there (real, viable) alternatives?

gmcabrita 12y ago
>I have already been getting spam through invites (where they get auto-added to my calendar even before I have a chance to see what they are). Fortunately you can turn this off in the Google Calendar settings. This way they only get added to your calendar if you accept.
lern_too_spel 12y ago
You could already add events to somebody's calendar by sending them an invite, and you could already mark events as spam. I don't see what's new here.
timcraft 12y ago
http://calendaz.com http://calendaz.com (disclaimer: I made it) I wanted a private calendar without sharing/invites too, so I ended up building my own (do not recommend unless you have a lot of time on your hands!). No spam, no ads, you own your data. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about it.

d0m 12y ago

I won't lie, I'm starting to become a google fanboy again thanks to the beautiful google material design experience. Hats off to the team behind this new calendar app.

oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
It's interesting how, as Apple's design sensibility gets more and more questionable with the recent changes to iOS and OSX, google appears to be finally paying due respect to good design and really putting the work in. And it's paying off, big time.
- fidotron 12y ago
  In the sense that it's annoying a lot of Android users, it certainly is paying off. What the current Android leadership simply don't understand is that there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS, not because they couldn't afford it. iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening, since if people wanted the iOS experience they might as well get the real thing. Design fascism works when you're in a niche, but will never be mass market. Windows Phone is similarly lauded in design circles but mysteriously fails to sell, and this is why. The crowds praising all these "improvements" are the sort of people that actually thought Windows Mobile was not only tolerable, but a good idea. My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch, and they aren't too concerned about existing users, but the side effect of this is that all of the major smartphone OSs have reached the same level of out-of-touch ness that we had prior to the original iPhone coming along.
  - gtaylor 12y ago
    > My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch Huh? I've been an Android user since the days of the Moto Droid, and I really like the design direction they're taking. It's clean, it's not full of crappy, drastic gradients and obscene amounts of clutter. Some of the menus/lists are organized better now, which I greatly appreciate. The Music app is actually bearable now. The Gmail app is better than ever for my usage cases. The only thing that annoys me is the new Message app removing the ability to swipe convos off when you are "done" with them. But that's a small little annoyance to get all of the other goodies. I'm sure there are others that hate it, but it's not like everyone does. I'm more satisfied with my phone now than I've ever been.

tspike 12y ago

Good grief, they sure are desperate to turn their most useful apps into activity streams. The day I have to scroll past an ad to check an appointment is the day I stop using Calendar.

maho 12y ago

My employer (German) just banned all Google products (except search) for work-related things, due to privacy issues. Reading Google's latest terms-and-conditions, this move is somewhat understandable, given the strong privacy laws that German companies and institutions have to follow. On the other hand, I guess that scanning a large amount of emails is the precise thing that allows them to offer robust email-to-event conversion. But I wish that this sort of thing would work locally (on the cellphone or computer in question), not on a remote server somewhere.

andybak 12y ago
It will be interesting to see if in years to come we'll look at Germany's policy as overly cautious and a net loss or extraordinarily prescient. I'm genuinely on the fence on this one. I'm rather cavalier on privacy issues (at least where they affect my own person) and quite happy with the goodies I receive in return. However I sometimes wonder how I'll feel with the benefit of hindsight.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  I meet quite a few people talking about moving their tech infrastructure away from US controlled cloud services. I may live in a bubble, but it would be interesting to see some data on intentions in EU companies about this.
  - fidotron 12y ago
    Not just in the EU - I hear this a lot in Canada too. My use of their services was even considered a red flag on a recent consulting gig. Another odd case I ran into is parents trying to prevent their children getting into the Google ecosystem until they're mid-teen level. This is manifesting in resistance to their education stuff being adopted by schools.
    - lstamour 12y ago
      I used to think that it was important to protect data from being stored in the US .... until the NSA leaks and the realisation that Canada is a Five Eyes member rendered it effectively moot. Now I'm simply more worried about theft or spying by non-government third-parties -- the security in place rather than the laws that apply to the service provider. But that's just me.

alphakappa 12y ago

I watched the video twice and I still can't figure out what the changes are about because I kept getting distracted by all the stuff happening in the background. Even after I purposely tried to focus on the device UI, I couldn't process all of it in any coherent way. Please don't make promo videos that leave me with no sense of the product you are trying to demo.

legohead 12y ago

cute video. I have no idea what the new calendar does.

pinaceae 12y ago

personnally i can't stand calendar views that do not show empty stretches of time - it is important info to me if i DON'T have anything coming up in the next two hours. i can see this at a glance in classic calendars. i cannot in this agenda/stream view. yay, progress.

patbuchanan 12y ago
Agreed - that's what I'm checking on the majority of the time myself.

obviouslygreen 12y ago

I've been using and (for the most part) promoting Android ever since the G1... but after 2.x the rate of UI change has, in my opinion, been terrible from a usability experience. Pretty much all software (whether that's apps, websites, programming languages, or anything else) past a certain complexity has quirks. Getting used to the quirks is part of learning the software. Massively changing large swathes of your built-in software is bad for users! I get that it'd be suicide to say "OK, permanent feature freeze... now," but big changes to the UI on apps that are (to many normal users) fundamental to using Android break the user's understanding of their use, often amounting to months of acclimation down the drain. It's very frustrating.

72deluxe 12y ago
I too have been using Android since the G1 (I still have it for testing on!) and I would agree that the introduction of new paradigms/ways of interacting with apps (seemingly introduced every I/O every year) is frustrating. The hamburger menu is in fashion. Then it isn't. Swiping from the left is, then it isn't. All of the examples in their design spec of how NOT to do things was precisely what they did on 2.x. I know you have to be seen to be "innovating" for attention-deficit new phone buyers, but living in a world of constantly shifting sands just means it's hard to see from all the dust blowing around in your face.
- jordanthoms 12y ago
  I don't see it the same way - Android's been behind the other smartphone operating systems in UI quality, and has had to iterate quickly in 2.x, 4.x and 5 in order to catch up. As they reach a point where Android has as good or better user interface as the competition (I think they're close to that now), the rate of change will most likely slow down.
  - iaskwhy 12y ago
    Also, it's a kind of new field for ergonomics and usability so all these changes (both hardware and software-wise) are something to be expected.

malkia 12y ago

Is there any 3rd party product that can sync gmail with apple's calendar? I have google phone/Chromebook, and my wife - iPhone/OSX. So I haven't really looked, but we were thinking of starting to use more and more the calender to sync up with things we need to do. Any recommendations?

kevruger 12y ago
I don't think you need any 3rd party products. I use an iPhone, an Android phone for work and use a Macbook Pro and my main calendar is my Gmail Google calendar which syncs among all 3 devices without any 3rd party software. I guess you may just need to know how to set it up on iOS and Mac products.

kentosi 12y ago

One thing I dearly miss from when Google Calendar first came out was the ability to type in text to create an event. Eg - Typing "Dinner tomorrow at 7:30pm at Foobar restaurant" would automatically create an event with the correct lexical components. It looks like they're finally reintroducing this back.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

_acme 12y ago

How does one use the task component of google calendar on an iOS device? How are google keep's tasks integrated with my google calendar?