Brajeshwar

Google Search is the de facto search engine for me and almost everybody else on the internet. Gmail is a good web based email client but have never been able to replace my desktop mail client and will not. I used it extensively for SVN/CVS notifications, mailing lists, newsletters, forum replies and everything else save for my personal & official mails. All other services of Google are good too but personally I don’t use any of them on a second to minute basis!

Everyday, as soon as I open my notebook; besides the tiny useful utilities, I have atleast 3 main applications opened all the time, Microsoft Oulook, Firefox running Gmail and Google’s Customized Home Page and my favorite Text-Editor (I am likely to move to NotePad++ soon).

I have been on a perpetual hunt for a good calendar application to share across our team and developers I work with. I have tried many commercial calendar sharing tools that plugs into Outlook but the feasibility of having that for everybody is nulled out because of either the license issues/cost or the very fact that majority of our team do not use Oulook, they are either totally on web based or Thunderbird or Outlook Express. I have tried Sunbird during their early beta days but was again not satisfied, mainly due to the fact that I have to have a full blown application just for the calendar. Thus, I never wanted to force another new application to the team.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is perhaps the much needed answer to my quest. It can be just another tab opened on a browser (all browsers have tabs these days - thanks to that genius who came up with this fantastic idea). And it is or will be plugged into all Google related, which is cool. It has not been 24 hours since I have been toying around with it, so my excitement may be a bit overfetched but then I have full faith in Google.

The only glitch at my end (I am not sure if this happens to others) is that I have to close and open gCalendar after adding a new calendar. Currently, features that I wish to have with gCalendar would be

• previous & next month’s calendar box displayed along with the current month on the left
• ability to sync with Outlook

Btw, that nerdy thingy that you saw all over blogs, I went out to check mine yesterday but decided not to have a separate article for it because of the result - 93% nerdy! I swear, I answered the options according to what came up to me, sometimes with a second thinking here and there. But let me tell you I am not that a nerd at all.

While you are on it, check out the Da Vinci Quest on Google - it is in the Fun & Games add-ons of Google.