the ishness · 2006-04-13 18:55

So, Google Calendar launched, to widespread “is that it?”. I’m not quite so harsh, it’s solid, fast, and has some nice public and private sharing functionality (lack of proper timezone support indicates, however, a pussyfooting around the really hard problems of calendaring).

Myself, I added one event “dinner tomorrow evening”, saw what it did, and gave up. I didn’t want an event tomorrow called “dinner evening”.

But this can be fixed.

More heinous is the flip side to natural event entry – natural event display. Google, like most others, is fixated on the grid. I don’t think the grid is completely wrong, but it forgets two things: lives don’t fit into 30 minute blocks, and humans are fine at dealing with small amounts of complexity. In fact, that’s the natural state.

Look at anyone’s paper diary and you’ll see a mosaic of signs and numbers, conflicts, and most of all, vagueness. Ishness. A day of a shopping list, two meetings, a few phone numbers, maybe one fixed appointment, an aide memoire, a doodle.

But still Outlook clones persist in the perfect rectangle. Start and end. No ishness. No possibilities. Anything remotely untimely is relegated to being a ‘day-long event’, and squished into a few lines at the top. This is the most important space, yet it’s treated as unfortunate clutter.

I’ve been boring anyone that would listen about this for well over a year now. I’m surprised none of the calendar start ups took the necessary risk and did something different with how events are stored and displayed.

Now it’s the only way out of being swallowed whole by Google.

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