Ten Minutes With Calgoo March 6, 2007

Intro: Calgoo is a service that a free online/offline software that lets you organize, synchronize and edit your calendars, whether they’re in Outlook or Google or iCal. Designed for business and family, it offers a way to coordinate disparate calendars, either those you own or those you want to share with others. In the fast-moving world of shared and public calendars, it offers a way to compose and coordinate schedules when you’re offline in a free standalone program that runs on Linux, Windows and Macs.

Executive summary: Nice idea, come back in six months when it works better.

My Ten Minutes: Things didn’t get off to a good start. Strangely the terms of use and privacy policy page didn’t load:

but that didn’t stop me signing up. (Who reads those things, anyway?) I wasn’t crazy about the problem signing up — it didn’t like my first two choices, but with the second one didn’t really explain why — which shaved another 30 seconds off the clock. The registration email came through nice and quickly though, and it’s then when you have to download — yes there is a Mac and a Linux version.

It was then I had to temporarily stop the clock to wait for the 14.7 MB file to download. A little large for my tastes. Anyway, once downloaded the software installs smoothly and then prompts you for your Calgoo and Google details. Then you’re in. Well, sort of.

The software itself isn’t exactly pretty. In fact, it’s pretty ugly. It’s the bog standard interface, with some stuff on the left (monthly calendar and lists on the left, and an unimaginative array of calendar views on the right (day, week, month, no customized views):

After you’ve synchronized your calendars — meaning Calgoo has downloaded the events to your computer, or imported them from Outlook — you can view and edit them in Calgoo. Supposably. In fact, I couldn’t. I loaded one of my Google calendars and couldn’t see anything. Nothing. It said it was loading, and it said it was it loaded, but not for me. I tried the same thing with my Outlook calendar, which it identified correctly, but then didn’t load anything. As far as Calgoo was concerned, I had a free month. Then it crashed.

Same with two other shared Google calendars I have. Calgoo figured I had the calendars OK, but didn’t load them. Then it crashed again. Finally, when I clicked on a month button for the fifth time, my appointments from some of my calendars suddenly appeared. In a violent shade of maroon and crimson. Or something.

The color scheme was awful. I mean, really awful. Seems the best colors had all been taken by the preloaded public holiday calendars, so all I had left were horror flick tones. The colors were so dark I couldn’t read the black writing on the labels. “I’m afraid I can’t attend any of my appointments this afternoon, because I can’t read them. I know I have some, and I know they’re today, it’s just that my calendar has been designed by someone who is color blind, so I’m going to have stay home.” (Yes, you can change the colors, and no, the feature doesn’t seem to work.)

I’m not saying Calgoo is a bad idea. I’m just not quite sure why one would use it. It really only makes sense if you don’t have something like Microsoft Outlook, or better Personal Information Managers (were they to exist) but who doesn’t have at least one of those? The real hole in the market is a decent tool that synchronizes all your online calendars with your offline calendars, not an interface that makes you think you’re back in the 1990s. (See SyncMyCal for an effort in this direction.) Calgoo’s best feature is being able to add Google calendar items when you’re offline, so that they can then be synchronized when you’re online, but it doesn’t make sense to do this in a single application (that doesn’t boast any features beside the calendar thing.)

Adding calendar items is straightforward enough, and you can add them on the fly from within the calendar itself (avoiding the old school way, with lots of fields to fill in.) I like the way you can quickly copy an item between one calendar and another with a right click. Synchronizing back to your online and Outlook calendars is just a question of clicking a button on the right hand corner of the screen. Still my default Google calendar wasn’t visible.

The interface needs a lot of work. And folk have gotten used to nice looking calendar interfaces, offline and online, so Calgoo needs to get with it and come up with something nicer. If they can they may be onto something.

Marks out of 10: 3