
A new day for Google Calendar - aren55555
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-new-day-for-google-calendar.html
======
lnanek2
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
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.

~~~
ImJasonH
The back button issue in the web UI was fixed recently.

~~~
orbitur
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.

------
msoad
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-
trans...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-
transitions.html)

~~~
jobu
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
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.

------
pradn
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
A QR code should be sufficient.

~~~
pradn
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
No, you can create a QR code that encodes a calendar event. See example:
[http://imgur.com/117Jn9D](http://imgur.com/117Jn9D)

------
jayshahtx
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
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)

------
d0m
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
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
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.

~~~
tree_of_item
What exactly don't you like about the new design direction? You mentioned
people wanting to switch because of Lollipop/material/"design facism", but I'm
not sure why.

~~~
fidotron
Almost everything. The colours, the flatness, the overreliance on animation to
reveal cues that have been hidden by removing too many of the useful aspects
of colours and depth.

Material design is a company led attempt to create a fad a la Metro. They'll
keep trying for about 18 months before they create a new one where it's back
to bevels again. Just don't expect any of the non-Google apps to follow it, in
the same way that all previous efforts went wrong.

Incidentally the number of U-turns by Google on this stuff is incredible. We
were previously told explicitly not to attempt doing physical analogues of
motion etc. as those didn't map to the app navigation model . . . but now
that's exactly what they want.

What really grates though is just how the developer experience for all this
stuff seems to be going backwards.

------
mholt
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.

~~~
twistedpair
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
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.

------
maho
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
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
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
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
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.

------
bruceboughton
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.

------
PMan74
> Posted by Ian Leader, Product Manager

Nominative determinism in action folks

~~~
twic
What? No, Google renames all its senior employees according to their function
now.

~~~
smacktoward
I wonder if he's related to Jennifer Government
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government))...

~~~
jmsbtlr111
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-
auck...](http://nz.gradconnection.com/universities/university-of-
auckland/zeus_engineer/633748/) )

------
netrus
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
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
Except AOSP Email was updated in Lollipop, as was Messenger.

~~~
lstamour
And there's a browser app again in L too...

------
amaks
Unfortunately web version has not been updated.

~~~
enobrev
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.

------
acalendar
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
Their calendar on the web can both import and export iCalendar feeds. I'm not
sure about automatically writing back updates though.

~~~
acalendar
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
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.

------
alphakappa
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.

------
matmann2001
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
I'm betting that this has something to do with deprecating GWT and supporting
AngularJS.

~~~
StevePerkins
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
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/)).

------
eslaught
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
>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.

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

------
ou812
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.

------
kentosi
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.

------
obviouslygreen
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
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
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
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.

~~~
72deluxe
Whilst true to some extent, it isn't as new as we think. Window Mobile has
been around for a very very long time and Palm OS preceded it with usable Palm
Pilot devices.

~~~
iaskwhy
Although it's not obvious, I guess popularity as a lot to do with ergonomics
and usability and their evolution so something will only continue to be pushed
forward if there's enough people to actually use it. I don't know, I'm just
thinking out loud why something which has been on the market for such a long
time only recently has seen such a crazy amount of innovation.

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

~~~
porges
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.

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

~~~
boiler_up800
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.

------
Pro_bity
And another reason to switch to Android.

------
malkia
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
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.

------
pinaceae
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
Agreed - that's what I'm checking on the majority of the time myself.

------
tspike
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.

------
_acme
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?

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

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

------
mey
Still no support for Windows app store it looks like.

~~~
guardian5x
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.

