Could you elaborate why google calendar is horrible for you?
A simple example is that here I sit in Hong Kong, and my upcoming flight from San Francisco to Melbourne (which departs at 00:50 PDT) is showing as departing at 17:50 HKT, which is true but useless. That's the hallmark of a system designed with the data structures in mind first. With (too many) clicks I can change it to display in PST, but now my diary for today in Hong Kong is wrongly displayed.
To some extent this is a flaw in iCalendar's data model, but it's not insoluble, if you start with the right perspective i.e. user stories. So my general complaint is that this kind of "data first" rather than "utility first" design pervades the Google Calendar application.
(Don't even get me started on the "world clock" extension, it's just garbage).
Judging by the listing of optional extensions in the "Labs" section, Google Calendar has languished with little serious development since 2009. The main utility to me these days is that it can aggregate multiple calendars, including subscriptions to external feeds, and then pass on that aggregation to mobile clients.
So I think it's another dying Google product, one that was misconceived in the first place, and I too am interested in alternatives. However calendaring is hard and none of the alternatives I've considered to date were actually better; all limited or flawed in other showstopping ways. So Google Calendar remains the least crap of my options.
- I can't easily create an event spanning over more than a month. Don't bother visualizing it easily.
- Displaying multiple calendars is a mess even with the event merging (45degree stripes turned on) (Event Merge for Google Calendar™)
- I was needed to install "Google Calendar Guests Modify Event Default" (Enables 'Guests can modify event' setting for google calendar by default, when creating a new event.)
- If I create an event I can't simply add myself and accept it
- Event view is boring, lots of things I don't care about. That view looks like a relic from the pre-design era of Google
- Setting up a repeating event is a pain, if I made a mistake god help me. Once I broke something and I had to manually delete two months of repeating events one by one because the repeating nature was somehow gone
- Exceptions are not handled well
- Show me as Available / Busy is dangerous. Should be more hidden, I messed up my coworkers calendar and she got overbooked. I still don't get why would I create an event and mark myself "available". I guess there are use cases, but for me it's pointless
- UI dialogs are inconsistent
There are probably many more, but I felt real pain during these. I even tried Google voice assistant, which was pretty useless for real work.
I then pulled up this video of Apple's vision of the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIE8xk6Rl1w and cried a little that we are still very far from this. Even calendaring is a pain in the ass.
Events view sucks. I don't think the visual information should be equal if I have a list of things to accomplish in a day that are "time locked" or "time sensitive" or "time orthogonal."
Integrating actual RescueTime data into gcal to provide automation of capturing activity would be an interesting angle if I wanted to hack together a solution for that problem.
RE: Apple -- iCal was honestly the best calendar I've ever used, it was just beautiful. Then I cleaned my soul and installed debian, and haven't looked back.
Try not to give reasons to discard someone's feedback, and instead identify the core issues which, if addressed, would benefit multiple users.
It doesn't matter how many people are stymied by poor behaviours, if they are the ones making recommendations to their contacts or businesses on what support could tracts to sign…
That's where the opportunity is.
On a related note keeping the same thing in mind with software that you're building is a very powerful tool: "it works for me/on my machine" is great, but it discounts the possibility that if one user is seeing a bug or usability issur, chances are that that others are too - and not talking about it.
I eventually gave up and used Google Apps Script to fing and update events which lost their repeating affinity when I accessed my calendar from multiple clients.
Another one: if you have a shared calendar that you want to invite to a meeting (but you don't own the shared calendar), …? This was for the orgs office hours calendar, where copying the event onto the shared calendar means remembering to update it every time we switched rooms or times (as copies naturally wouldn't update if the source changes).
The Google Product Support pages send a strong, consistent message: "we don't care what you think and we don't fix things we can't see the personal use for ourselves"; hallmarks of deeply user-hostile products.
2. Google wants me to use their web-based calendar instead of my desktop one.
Synchronising multiple calendars is a pain in the ass: I want people at each company I work for to be able to see whether I am free, but I hate filling my calendar six times. I've got some applescript that helps me using the Mac calendar, but it feels like the two companies I do that are google-apps based always break randomly and require some random touchups.
3. Timezones. I travel very often and I want to see my daily-diary with the local team, but there's no easy way to say "this week in EST"
Very few Google services, I think, are reminded that people can be signed into multiple accounts simultaneously during the design phase.