30boxes vs. Google Calendar

I guess I was a little quick to mention “30boxes”:http://30boxes.com/ yesterday. That’s not to say that I don’t like 30boxes any more — I do, indeed. However, I’ve learned a few things since then.

First, one of the greatest things about 30boxes, the OneBox where you can use natural language to schedule appointments, is actually a fairly common feature these days in Web 2.0 Calendaring applications.

Secondly, “Google Calendar”:http://calendar.google.com/ has been released today. That’s right, finally, after all the speculation, *Google has released a Web 2.0 calendar*. It’s not perfect, but it’s got lots of nice features too. In fact, if I could create a hybrid of the two, I’d be in heaven.

Here’s what I like more about Google Calendar:

* In Google Calendar, if I allow it, other users can edit my calendar. This is very useful for people who have an assistant scheduling appointments for them, or for a pool of calendar updaters for a team or group calendar. 30boxes doesn’t allow other users to edit my calendar at all.
* In Google Calendar I can view my calendar as a list, or by day, week, month, or any of several custom formats. 30boxes only allows me… well… 30 boxes. If I hover over a box I can see a listing for the day, but it’s not quite the same.
* Google Calendar’s day view shows appointments in a time grid. 30boxes just shows a daily list. A list is good for a quick glance, but a time grid is good when comparing multiple calendars or trying to get a glance of your day’s appointments in order to find a place to schedule another.
* Google Calendar appointments can be categorized into calendars, and each calendar is color coded which is very useful for determining which appointments are which at a quick glance. 30boxes allows you to manually color code appointments, but the colors are not based on the appointments classification.
* Google Calendar inputs appointments into the currently selected category. 30boxes requires you to explicitly set categories on each new appointment made.
* Google Calendar’s human language parser seems to be more flexible and more intelligent than 30boxes’s.
* Google Calendar has a view that allows a user to see only Free/Busy information. 30boxes doesn’t have this at all.

Here’s what I like more about 30boxes:

* Google Calendar only allows an appointment to be in one category. However, with 30boxes, any appointment can have as many categories as you’d like.
* 30boxes has a large array of syndication options. This includes displaying RSS data inline on the calendar, and subscribing to iCal calendars as well as providing an iCal and RSS view of your appointments by tag.
* It’s really annoying that every time I click in the Google Calendar window (just to bring it to the foreground) it pops up the “Add an Event” screen.

So, if Google Calendar would take these features from 30boxes, I’d have a perfect solution:

* Allow appointments to be in multiple Categories.
* Allow many more incoming syndication options.
* Allow other public and private views of the calendar.
* Stop being annoying.

Or, if 30boxes would take these features from Google Calendar, I’d be set:

* Allow other users to edit my calendar.
* Allow categories to be color coded.
* Allow other calendar views (2 weeks, 1 week, 1 day, etc).
* Implement a Time Grid
* Beef up the human language parser.
* Implement Free/Busy Information.

On the surface it may look like Google Calendar has won this war, but the areas in which Google Calendar is deficient are much more useful than the areas in which 30boxes is deficient. Therefore, it’s not as clear cut as counting the items in the lists.

Additionally, it should be noted that both services are quite useful as is. I have “very high demands”:http://revjim.net/2005/08/19/online-calendaring-solution/ when it comes to Calendaring, so, the fact that these services even come close to what I’m looking for means they must be doing pretty damn good.