Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am feeling particularly trusting that you will not judge me for being crazy for the
angle that I’m going to take on today’s demo.
The demo: Google Calendar mobile versions, iOS and Android, which are now identical apps.
Let’s take a look at them, the angle.
Now calendars are boring things if you think about it.
You put in an appointment, you recall that appointment later.
Boy, it’s boring.
But it strikes me that every year at Christmas time, people exchange beautiful calendars
with each other.
They want their calendars to look like artwork.
They’re things that we look at a lot so we add photos, they add seasonal context to
what’s going on in the calendar, which we typically don’t have on our computer.
Well, Google has done a couple of things with their mobile version of the calendar, one
of which is they made it seamlessly integrate with the desktop version, it will look the
same and they’ve made it very accessible.
That is a good thing.
But the thing that I find really interesting is they’ve made a way for the calendar to
be more interesting, to be richer, to make it feel like you’re more engaged in life
if you use Google Calendar.
You think I’m crazy right now, I know you do, but I’m not.
Stick around and I’ll show you why today on DottoTech.
As I said, Google has now standardized the Google Calendar app on iPhone and Android.
It looks identical in both worlds.
I’m going to start things of today on my iPhone 6+ and then I will also show you some
of this demo on my Android, my Samsung Galaxy Note Edge phone so that you can see that it
looks the exact same in both.
As far as I can see with one small exception, all of the functionality is the exact same
as well.
So kudos to Google for making the app the same in all of the different platforms.
So when you launch the Google Calendar on your smartphone, of course it’s going to
sync to your existing Google Calendar, and for a long time Google has been my calendar
of choice.
One of the beauties of the Google Calendar is that I can use it as a base and I can sync
other tools to it.
For example, I use Sunrise Calendar, which has always been really the strongest of the
mobile versions of the calendar apps.
I’ve synced it to the database within the Google Calendar for a long time and it’s
great from that perspective.
And a nice thing about this actually, this whole thing is, if you like Google Calendar
on the iPhone, you can switch back and forth between it and other calendar apps and t’s
easier and more elegant than say doing it with email apps.
You’re not storing as much data so you can actually switch horses mid-race occasionally
if you want with no harm done.
Having said all that, we take a look here at Google Calendar and when we first open
it up, we see it’s got a very clean and very functional interface, which a calendar
should have.
We need access to the basic information.
But I will dress this up for you in just a few moments.
The functionality is identical to on the desktop.
If we tap on the left-hand side at the top, we can come up with different views in decide
exactly which calendars we are going to be looking at, turn on or off calendars and each
one that we turn on will have a different color-coded editions.
If I turn on holidays and birthdays, you see when I go back, now all of a sudden I’ve
got all these green holidays and birthdays that have been added.
So you can turn on and off calendars to your heart’s delight depending on which calendars
you subscribe to on your desktop version so you can gain access to more or less information
if you need it.
That is all very good.
As far as the view goes, you can view your day at a time or you can view it by a three-day
or a week view that they have here on the smartphone, on the iPhone.
On the Android phone, they have a month view.
I haven’t found it on the iPhone so that’s the one big difference that I’ve noticed.
I don’t like any of those views.
This is the view I like.
It’s called the schedule view and all it does is it shows appointment stacked on appointments.
You can look and if you’ve got a lot of appointments in a day, the day will seem very
long.
If you’ve got no appointments in the day, there’ll be no entries at all.
I like this interface.
I find it tremendously functional and easy to use.
Actually of all of the different calendar interfaces that I’ve looked at, I think
this is the cleanest and I like this one the best.
Now one of the things that we do a lot with our calendars is we add appointments and this
is where I’m going to start to show you what I was talking about in the beginning,
how Google is making it more engaging and we making our calendar in our lives a little
more beautiful.
So let’s add an appointment and to do that, we tap on the + button in the bottom and you
start typing in an event.
I’m going to type in “lunch.”
Let’s say I’m booking a lunch with my good buddy, Bosco Anthony, so I say a lunch
meeting, As I start typing in the word, “Lunch meeting,” up comes the option to create
lunch meeting.
So they have prefills.
And what Google is recognizing is typically if you’re putting in a lunch meeting, it’s
going to be at a location and it’s going to be with somebody so look, they’re asking
me a question, where’s it at?
So I can just start typing in the name of the location.
So let’s meet at my—there’s a really nice botanical garden that’s got a wonderful
little restaurant, It’s called VanDusen here in Vancouver and as I start to type that
in, look, up comes the address.
So I put VanDusen Botanical Gardens.
Now what it does is it will populate into the appointment the address and the location
of the restaurant that we’re going to be meeting at.
So as I’m going to it, if I’ve forgotten the location or if I’ve forgotten where
it was or if I don’t know where it is, especially when I share this appointment with Bosco,
then you can use the directions in order to get there.
You can use in the built-in location services and GPS.
So it pre-populates that information so you don’t have to type it in.
Again, it looked to our calendar to add people and I’m going to put in my good buddy, Bosco,
and I’m all ready to go.
Watch what happens when I say Done.
I love this.
You say done and it saves it.
Look at the bottom of the event.
You can see what it’s done is it’s pulled the header image from the VanDusen’s Botanical
Gardens mobile site and it’s plugged it in to the calendar appointment so it’s kind
of dressed up the appointment.
But the best part is when we look at it now in the screen, when we look at it in the view,
it’s done the same thing.
So all of a sudden instead of just having a list of events, I’ve got a list of events
with some supporting graphics.
Now if it’s a plain and simple lunch appointment and it doesn’t have a location on it, it
will just put a plate and a knife there but it still looks that much better.
I really, really like this.
Now when I look at my day, it’s not just a series of appointments but it becomes a
series of events, a series of connections because it’s adding these different graphical
elements.
Now I don’t want to overstate it.
It’s not life-changing but it makes me feel better looking at it and it’s causing me
to look long and hard at using Google Calendar in my smartphone an awful lot more than I’m
using the other calendar apps just because I like looking at the appointments.
Plus it works.
It’s very, very, very functional.
Now how about in the Android world, Steve?
You’ve promised that you’d show it to us in Android.
Let me show you the same thing in the Android.
If I take a look at the Android version—now this is on my Samsung Galaxy or my Samsung
Note Edge smartphone—we can see that it’s got the exact same view.
All of the different selections in the same.
Here’s the one additional selection point that you have is you can view a month and
time, which actually isn’t horrible but it looks way too claustrophobic for me.
So instead, we choose the same scheduling level and all of the same features, the same
way of entering information, the same way of viewing information, it’s now the same
in both iOS and Android.
So for me, the native Google Calendar might be my first recommendation for people to take
a look at.
If you need some other sophisticated services like we’ve shown in Sunrise, you might look
at some other solutions.
But as I say, one of the best parts of it is you can use multiple calendar apps without
kind of polluting the water because it’s not quite the same as using multiple email
apps where you have to download the email into the app each time.
Multiple calendar apps work fine as far as I’m concerned at least.
So give it a shot.
Take a look at the new Google Calendar and if you’re like me, you’ll probably really
enjoy how it dresses up your day and makes every day seem like an event rather than just
a series of responsibilities.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
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Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.