Murphy Mac

Google updated its calendar application this week and added some critical features. In the past you could only set reminders for your primary calendar. Now you can set them on every calendar.

Furthermore, each calendar under your account can have different notification settings. For example - a calendar called Screencast Schedule might be set to send pop-up notifications while a calendar called Client Dinners might send Email and SMS reminders.

This is a great improvement. The only thing Murphy doesn’t like is having to dig down into an appointment to change the notification behavior if he wants something other than the default. Murphy is a big fan of the Quick Add feature. It’s much easier to set dates and times using Quick Add than with the clunky drop-downs in the edit-appointment form. If Murphy only wants an SMS for certain appointments he has to go into the appointment, click options, and change the settings.

Murphy’s solution to this inconvenience is documented here. He doesn’t turn on the gCal SMS feature for any of his calendars. Instead, he lets gCal send an email reminder. Then his Gmail account filters those emails and sends appointments matching a certain criteria to the phone.

With gCal’s new features you could continue to do it this way. Despite the improvements, the calendar only seems to support Quick Add for the main calendar. Otherwise you might make two calendars for something like “Social Engagements” - one that sends an SMS and one that doesn’t.

Here’s another feature you might not know about in the Google Calendar: When you use Quick Add you can enter an email address on the entry line. That will add that person to the invited guests of the appointment. You can also use Quick Add for recurring events.

What Google Calendar really needs: The ability to specify other things on the Quick Add line. Like which calendar to place the appointment on and what kind of reminder you’d like to receive. It’s much more efficient for keyboard-oriented users who don’t want to click all over the place just to make an appointment.

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