Calendars ($6.99) is a specialized app that allows you to see your various Google Calendar accounts in one place. It doesn’t support multiple logins, but it can display all of the calendars you’ve subscribed to. My quick walkthrough (shown above) should give you the gist of how the app functions, and I’ve also published a few thoughts on the whole experience after the jump. How convenient!
First of all, you can probably ignore all of those App Store reviews about Calendars and how it simply doesn’t work. There was indeed a major problem with the syncing process with the release build, but it has since been fixed, and the app syncs pretty flawlessly with my cloud calendars.
The second thing you should know is that this isn’t really a local calendar app. iOS 4 has enabled developers to write directly to the calendar, but this isn’t what Calendars does. Instead, it syncs constantly with your Google account and pushes its own local notifications to you when an alarm rings. I actually have an indirect sync with my default Calendar.app and Calendars because I have all of my contacts and calendar events synced over Exchange, but that’s another story altogether.
Calendars takes after the online GCal interface for the most part, although it looks a lot better. Tapping on a date will bring up an event creation box, and holding down on an event will let you drag it and drop it to any other date and time of your choosing. The only thing that’s out of place here is that you still have to fill in event details manually. Google Calendar features something called “Quick Add” that automatically parses your text for fields like “location”, “date”, and “time”. Calendars does no such thing, and that’s a shame, since the app would have been a lot better for it (see QuickCal Mobile if you’re interested in this functionality).
The one thing that keeps me from really taking this app on as a Calendar.app replacement is the sensitivity of the control scheme. Most everything in the app looks great (except, perhaps, for the date picker, which leaves half of the screen blank), but it’s far too easy for you to bring dialogue boxes up with a mis-tap. There are also minor instances where you’ll start to type an event title in and the entry box will close all by itself. I’m sure the latter problem will be ironed out in a bug fix release, but I’m hoping that future versions of Calendars find some way to spread the controls out a bit more, or at least change the mechanic for bringing up an event dialogue.
[Update: one thing that didn’t hit me until I had already published this quick review is that Calendars is a universal app. I usually take this for granted because I’m not an iPad owner, but it does account for at least some of the cost. However, even with this in mind, I still think the app is a little too pricey.]
I fear that most people won’t even consider trying Calendars out, thanks to its $6.99 asking price. With so many other calendar apps out there, and the ability to sync with Google Calendar over exchange built right into iOS, Calendars seems like a tough sell right for seven dollars. A tweaking of the control scheme and a price that’s more in line with current App Store offerings, could well change that, though.
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Calendars was provided by Readdle, Inc. for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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