Apparently, I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve missed out on the rumours of Google Calendar. I woke up this morning and hit up my RSS feeds while eating breakfast and found a post by Adam Israel that Google had deployed a calendaring program via their Google Accounts. Arstechnica has a writeup.

Feature List:

They’ve tied it into Gmail, when an email mentions an event and time, click a couple of times and it shows up on your calendar. They aren’t providing a whole lot more that’s new besides that if you’re a user of iCal and some sort of publishing software like phpicalendar. (I do mine this way, you can check it out if you want.)

There are a couple things I don’t like however.

1) Google still isn’t supporting Safari. This has been an issue for me with Gmail as well, but things mostly work there. Google Calendar though? I get an message saying Safari isn’t supported every time I visit. Secondly, every time I click on a different page (week view, month, etc.) I get a huge error message that flows off the screen and I have to blindly hit enter on the message.

2) Funny… the Google Calendar thing doesn’t show up in Gmail for me (even when using Firefox, a supported browser.)

3) I can’t publish from iCal to Google Calendar. Sure, I can export from iCal and then import into Google Calendar, but that’s a pain every time I change an event. With phpiCalendar, everytime I make a change, it’s uploaded to the server via webDAV.

4) The imported calendar isn’t even correct. Events that I delete in iCal still show up in Google Calendar. This doesn’t happen when I publish to my calendar. Look: Google Calendar (well, you could look if I could figure out how to get a link to that day) and phpiCalendar.

So, what am I going to do? I’ll probably upload my calendars just to play around with it. To have a timely and updated version of my schedule on the web though, phpiCalendar is still the solution I’m going to stick with.