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The new Google Calendar for web

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It's amazing how my gut reactions to Google announcements have changed over the years.

Ten years ago: "Google released a new upgrade to X? Sweet! I wonder what cool stuff they added!"

Today: "Google released a new upgrade to X? Ugh. I wonder what features/workflows they broke or removed."

Am I just a cynical jerk, or do other people feel this way too?

That's one of the reasons that I've been moving off of their platforms. I remember when they had light, useful, efficient pages that let you get your work done then move on. They've slowly been moving everything to large, slow, bloated, whitespace-nightmares while removing functionality.

If Google was starting as a new company today, there would be no way that I'd use any of their products.

Ive gone through the same thing except with every product by everyone. I hate to admit it, but im pretty sure thats definition of cynicism.

I'm biased here, but after Inbox, and after the mobile Calendar apps being upgraded, I was super excited about the web Calendar upgrade. I love it.

I generally like Inbox as well, feels faster than gmail. Though i've recently gone back to using a local client instead of the web. It's a bit of a change, but just feels simpler to use.

The Inbox webapp always worked incredibly slowly for me on Firefox but fast on Chrome. Now I only use the Android app (and only when I need to use the snooze or Trips features) for everything else I use Gmail webapp on Firefox

Which local client do you use? Do you download all your emails locally? What about search?

Search has been faster than it used to be. I've noticed this in Mail on iOS as well. I use airmail, which i don't think it downloads all emails locally.

I like Inbox, and I use it...but have you noticed that, stunningly, you can search for things in Inbox and get zero results and then take that same search into _gmail_ and get results??

(Unfortunately, no, I don't have an example I can demonstrate extemporaneously)

Search for emails should be the same between the 2. But I believe Gmail will search other things (like Hangouts chats and maybe other products), while Inbox's search just does email.

Maybe the search is less different than I think it is.

But there are other things... like, am I wrong, or can you still not Mark As Unread in Inbox? Last I checked, you couldn't mark as unread, and if you tried to find out how you'd run into zealots who tell you that your use-case is wrong and that you're using Inbox wrong. So, okay, say I accept that premise; say I accept that there are some things that are just 'the Inbox way' and others are 'the gmail way'.

With the click of a button, Gmail lets you save all attachments to Google Drive or download all attachments as a zip--why in the world wouldn't they include that with Inbox?

Gmail lets you click an icon in the search bar to reveal advanced search options; if you need to search for something that has an attachment in Inbox you need to either A) google how to do it or B) try to remember "now was it has:attachment? or has-attachment:true? has-attachment:yes?". Is it really so distracting having that little down-arrow icon in the search bar?

Also, testing just now I found that the pagination in gmail would let me browse through hundreds of search results going back to 2012 whereas the Inbox endless-page stopped loading additional results by the time I got to email from 2014.

This happens to me _everytime_. So frustrating. Is it possible that inbox only searches the literal "inbox" whereas Gmail searches your entire mailbox?

Inbox doesn't search hangouts conversations, which is a huge annoyance for me. You can load gmail and search and get those results, so it's annoying that you can't get it in Inbox. Other than that, I really prefer Inbox.

Isn't it kind of crazy that gmail is the ONLY place you can search Hangouts chat history??

I didn’t even know that was a thing until today, and I’ve been using Gmail for a decade.

If at least it was possible to search something in a conversation from the Chrome extension, that would solve the issue for me.

> Today: "Google released a new upgrade to X? Ugh. I wonder what features/workflows they broke or removed."

I think that's inevitable with any product with a bit of history that's accreted features.

Microsoft Office? Windows? iPhone? Thinkpad?...

Excel 2016 integrated PowerQuery features and improved upon the data model tools. Going back further, Excel v1 thru v7 was limited to 2^14 rows (16,384); v8 (10yrs after v1) thru v11 upped that to 2^16 rows (65,536); v12 (20yrs after v1) thru current can handle 2^20 rows (1,048,576).

Windows 10 is faster and more secure than any consumer version of Windows ever released; PowerShell (slow to start up and verbose, though it may be) makes CMD.exe look like a kid's toy; Win8.1 added the Win+X menu, a ridiculously useful shortcut for our crowd; and the Windows Reset feature--show me a tech that doesn't love having that baked-in. We also have the (not perfect but still better than nothing) Windows Subsystem for Linux. And we have improved container support on the horizon.

iPhone: SecureEnclave, TouchID, ApplePay, waterproofing; and they continue to try to improve security and privacy.

EDIT: Corrected 2^14 = 16,374; not 65,536 as I had originally written. Credit to unwind for the correction.

2^14 is not 65536, it's just 16384.

D'oh! Right you are!

No. The biggest case in point is just Google Groups. It feels like they just let the interns go "fuck my shit up" over there.

If you're just a cynical jerk, then you're not alone. I feel similarly. Even worse, my reaction these days is "I wonder what new way they have to make even less useful information be displayed on the screen, while making the product even more bloated and unusable on anything but most trivial datasets".

While siphoning up more user data.

I fully agree with you. When they try to iterate on a basic utility application (ex: email, calendar, reminders, etc..) just because they have a bored developer that is looking to be noticed inside of google they usually make it less useful for people who have been using it successfully for years. Those users are now having to find an alternative to do the same thing. Sometimes it's OK to leave a wrench as a wrench.

My immediate reaction was: "oh god eyecandy + broken features". I felt the same way with Inbox (which, thankfully, was not pressed onto users). They seem to make cosmetic changes (IMO material-UI is clunky) which in turn make things harder to use, or they just straight-up remove stuff on which one relied previously.

I actually thought Inbox was a refreshing change for email management, particularly snoozing, but I wish they would port the rest of gmail to it. It's a horrible UX to have to switch from Inbox to gmail to manage filters and anything else that even remotely caters to a "power user".

There's no need to be a cynical jerk...

...they are just going to cancel it a few years from now.

I have been using this new calendar as a beta tester and honestly I loved it. It's not world changing, but makes some routine tasks simpler.

I think Calendar web is the first major product update from Google that gets nothing broken/left out compare to the old version. I happily accepted the new version without trying to find the "switch back to old version" link. Mind you, we heavily rely on calendar's web UI internally. The calendar team did a great job to make sure you won't miss any feature from the old web UI.

Disclaimer I work for Google on unrelated project.

I do have a problem with Google Calendar's feature-set, however they did fix one of my problems in the past-- no "month view" in the iOS app.

To force this update to Calendar without it being rolled out to you yet, you can use this query string parameter:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/render?new_calendar_opt...

EDIT: Apparently it might not save the preference, so you'd need to use this link every time.

Trying the link "https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r" after upgrading, seems to work as well.

Doesn't seem to work on GSuite

Yeah, that's only for the consumer variety.

We just have to wait for rollout

In GSuite your admin can control the timing of the update. If you're the admin, see the setting here: https://admin.google.com/AdminHome#AppDetails:service=Calend...

Am I just missing it, or did they get rid of the 'Quick Add' natural language parsing option (e.g. "Meeting with Fred tomorrow at 5p")? That has easily been the most valuable feature of Google Calendar since day one.

Good catch, I left feedback on this. Pressing "c" as a keyboard shortcut allows for the create event screen to be brought up, but it's no substitute.

Pressing 'q' still 'works,' but doesn't actually interpret the data you input, and instead just makes an event at the current time and day. Also left feedback.

I'm guessing they consider that overlaps with Google assistant, so they've chosen to let GA take care of it.

I wish calendars would come with booking ability. If I want to schedule a conference room, a laptop, the company car, and the spare parking permit (for example), I have to go to four separate calendars. I'd rather be able to schedule an event and assign resources to it.

I've used Rapla (http://rapla.org/) for this in my lab, and it worked nicely. You schedule an event, it lets you know what resources are available for that timeslot.

Is the process of adding 'rooms' which are actually arbitrary 'things' (like your laptop, company car, or spare parking permit which is picked up from reception) in calendar not a viable hack for some reason? I imagine this can scale to whatever you want to reserve.

I meant I wish Google Calendar would have a resource reservation system. Rapla allows resources to be scheduled. You cando this in Google Calendar only by separately making events for each resource's calendar.

No that is pretty much it, although a little awkward. I wasn't aware of this feature, and must be fairly new. I was doing the rapla booking stuff 3 or four years ago.

I don't know how this was set up at my work, but there is a separate section to add rooms, and it only lists the rooms that are open during that time. (Unfortunately the list includes every building owned by the company, so I scroll through 10 other buildings to find mine..)

You're probably using a Calendar Resource.

Here's a how-to guide for the curious: https://robinpowered.com/blog/how-to-set-up-room-resource-ca...

And the official support page: https://support.google.com/a/answer/1686462?hl=en

Outlook can do this.

Does the "Rooms" feature not fit what you're looking for? https://imgur.com/oiiSdWL

Having rooms is supported - and shown in the actual blog post:

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

I can't see why you wouldn't be able to make a car a room - other than that the UI will stay say 'room reserved' or whatever.

Work at Google but not remotely on calendar, and this is exactly what we do with most public, bookable resources. We have PA systems, massage chairs, rooms, etc. all in calendar.

I was not aware of this feature. How long has it been included?

I first used it a couple years ago. I think it is only for GSuite accounts though. I have it on my work calendar, but not my personal one.

If it's as slow and RAM-hungry as newer versions of Gmail I'll be looking for the "basic HTML" equivalent for it ASAP.

Is gmail RAM-hungry due to styling?

I'm sure Javascript's most of it, but styling's probably a (much smaller) factor too.

Besides, these changes to Calendar don't appear to involve only styles.

Mostly due to JavaScript, though styling can be a problem too; the gmail stylesheets have a huge number of rules (over 10,000), with a fair amount of duplication in them. For example, gmail has about 4600 rules that all set a background-image of "//ssl.gstatic.com/chat/emoji/png28-7f9d3a5045813584f828fe69a1fecb77.png" according to <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1397971#c0>. You can see some data on the styling end in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1392314 and its dependencies.

Anyway, I just tried loading gmail in Firefox, pulling up about:memory, and measuring. The overall gmail window takes about 125MB of RAM over here, not counting its images. Style data is about 27MB of that. Another 11.5MB is DOM (6MB of textnodes). Most of the rest is JavaScript.

And _boy_ is there a lot of JavaScript. I'm seeing a 15MB arraybuffer from a hangouts iframe (why is that there by default on gmail? I've never used hangouts!). 2MB of just Function objects on gmail itself, out of 10MB total for JS bits. 8MB of objects/functions/arrays for _another_ hangouts iframe. 4MB of JS stuff for a notifications.google.com iframe.

Note that a lot of the style and DOM bits above were _also_ for the hangouts iframes. Just eyeballing it, about half the memory gmail is using over here is actually for those hangouts iframes...

Oh, and none of that includes the strings. There's 10MB of strings, including at least three more or less identical-looking strings with nearly 1 million characters each that look like stylesheet text. And then another 500k-character stylesheet-text string.... And yes, I just forced a full GC and those strings are still there; gmail is keeping them around somehow.

I wonder how much longer it'll be before we re-invent the wheel yet again and mobile things actually have cached library version hell like Windows DLLs became? Are we already there (or is it too optimistic for me to assume that the /exact/ same version of a library can be referenced and de-duplicated)?

has about 4600 rules that all set a background-image of "//ssl.gstatic.com/chat/emoji/png28-...

Is that possibly a sprite sheet with different background position for each rule?

Ah, good catch. Yes, it is. See https://ssl.gstatic.com/chat/emoji/png28-7f9d3a5045813584f82...

It could probably specify the background image only once in a rule that matches all the relevant things and then specify the background positions separately. Sure would be more efficient without the browser having to jump through hoops to deduplicate the url.

I really hope this will let me manage multiple calendars the way the app does… just be signed in to all of them... don’t make me "share" them with each other.

Seems like they got rid of their intelligent time parsing. In the old Calendar I could type "Walk dog 7p" and it would create a "Walk dog" event at 7pm. Now it just creates an all-day event with the text "Walk dog 7p". Feedback sent.

Maybe try "pm"? "7p" isn't a time.

7p is just shorthand. Either way, it doesn't work for 7p or 7pm whereas it used to for either format.

I just want to be able to easily schedule a 15 or 45 minute long meeting :P

You can change the default meeting time to 15 minutes under settings. Once you have done that, just clicking defaults to a 15 minute meeting. You can already drag a 30 minute meeting to a 45 minute meeting pretty easily. This is close to what you want, but it does not solve the problem of being able to easily click and start a meeting at 9:15 with a 15 minute duration. Microsoft Outlook (desktop application) has a way to change the default intervals (example: 4 divisions show for an hour if you choose 15 minutes versus 2 divisions for 30 minutes) shown on the calendar - that would be a nice feature for Google to add.

I just want to easily create a repeating schedule for an odd number pattern e.g. every second Wednesday or every third Wednesday.

Microsoft Outlook is easier although the Outlook application is easier than the Office.com calendar.

I want an appointment that recurs on the 5th Saturday of every month. If anyone knows how to do that in google calendar let me know!

Like the new look quite a bit. I wish they would add a way to jump to dates though. I've been using Google calendar for several years now, and sometimes i want to look back a few years. Right now I have to click 20-30-40 times on the month arrow.

ETA: Looks like google labs is totally gone from the new setup?

If you change the view to Year in the top right you can go back years at a time and then switch back to a more granular view

That's huge, thank you!

Seems like material design eye candy. Any ways to take a screen shot of your google calendar while hiding the titles? To share with external people to schedule meetings.

The fact that you want to share a screenshot of a web app to share with other people suggests that some workflows are broken and some features are missing :(

Nothing is missing. You can already do what OP is looking for (share your availability without showing titles' name). Will share it in the original comment.

I believe the only way right now is to make the calendar public/shareable, while enabling the option to hide the event details. I do not want my calendar link public, I only want to show a defined timeframe snapshot. So yah, I think you are right.

Your calendar link will not be public, you only give access to one person and can hide all of the events' details. If that's still too much and you want to only share availability for one week, maybe you can use appointment slots?

If I want to share today's schedule with someone, but do not want them to see my schedule tomorrow, what is my option? Screenshot.

No need to go around sharing screenshots, there's a much easier way:

You can share [0] your work calendar with anybody you want (or if your company is using GSuite, they can give people access to their colleagues' calendars); if events' titles are sometimes confidential, you can either set those to secret, and people will see them as "busy" without any other information, or you can set your whole calendar to secret and all events will look that way.

You can also use appointment slots [1] if that works better for your use case.

[0] https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37082?hl=en

[1] https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/190998?hl=en

Thanks for the help. Sadly the appointment slot functionality relies on having meetings set to secret, otherwise the person looking to schedule a slot can see everything, and you can also see any week. If I set the calendar to 'busy' for all meetings, my gsuite coworkers can't see my calendar anymore.

You can give view permission to just a subset of coworkers and make it free/busy for anyone else.

I've recently built a small web app to share your calendar (with hidden event titles) via a private link: https://cal.tf/

This is awful. In the current UI, my appointment says "Open House". In the new UI, in compact mode, it says "Open". In responsive mode, it says "Op".

The problem with this (and Inbox) is that material design just doesn't translate to a big web browser canvas with a mouse etc.

It just feels... bad.

I seconding you on that. The material design (MD) seems to be empty of my computer. I think Google right now is confusing the ability to read a website with a smartphone, and the ability to read a website with a computer. Sure, MD looks great on my phone, but I also love to use Google products on my computer (and I use them mostly on my computer).

Nice to see an improved UI. But it feels almost identical to Outlook calendars in layout, something I have been using for years.

If you use GSuite, your admin can control the timing of this update. If you're the admin, you can change the setting here: https://admin.google.com/AdminHome#AppDetails:service=Calend...

I hope this makes it easy to create/edit events without going back and forth between calendar view and event view, especially when you have additional details to add (like location). The current version of Google Calendar for the web is so outdated in terms of the functionality it offers and the way it looks.

Does anyone know why it's not possible to change the calendar for a given event in the Google Calendar iOS app? You can change the color of an event, but not the actual calendar the event is associated with. It drives me crazy. You have to delete the event and re-create it under the correct calendar.

This is the same on the native Android app. No way to change a calendar for an event once added - have to pop over to a browser. Pretty annoying.

Allow me to recommend aCalendar+. All the features you need.

Can the Google Calendar Android App get notifications that are independent of the Google Launcher App? Launcher isn't allowed to send notifications because it sends too many irrelevant notifications, but this also means no calendar reminders anymore.

Launcher is sending you irrelevant notifications about what? Launcher isn't sending you anything it's something else(so turn that off) and you dont need Google's launcher to get calendar notifications and the mere fact that you are asking this says you are confused.

Maps nagging me to confirm I was at specific locations at specific times, news articles I don't want to read, etc. Just now I re-enabled Launcher notifications, and it's notifying me that I can unlock my phone by saying "OK Google". This is common knowledge and not a notification I want or can use, but have no way to disable this irrelevance.

Google calendar funnels notifications through the Google App, just like all Google apps, at least on my device.

You could turn off those things and you dont need the default Google launcher to get notification(from Google app or whatever). I am here looking at a calendar reminder on my phone and I dont use the Google launcher.

To turn of those location questions open Google Maps->Settings->Notification->Your contributions. Toggle what you want and dont want to be notified about.

People seem to complain about this and not realise for some reason that it could be turned off without having to resort to something as crude as blocking the notification.

How do I get rid of the notifications telling me that I can unlock my phone by saying "OK Google"?

Do your calendar notifications come from Google Calendar? Mine don't, and I don't know why.

It's not readily apparent how to disable most of these, so the whole notification is disabled. It's a UI deficiency that could be argued to be a dark pattern.

Oreo let's you granularly modify notifications.

Not much help if you are stuck on an older release, but it has been really useful to me so far !

Oreo is available. I will upgrade after work. Thanks for the reminder.

Oreo can't download, and there is no error message to troubleshoot. https://i.imgur.com/Uw0uIPU.png

haha

yeah an error message (or at least a code) might be useful here

I would love it if Google Calendar notified you when you accepted multiple invites for the same date & time. It boggles my mind that this wasn't a feature from the start.

Google Calendar PM, please add the ability to add meeting room links to the little pop-up, rather then just the dynamically created ones from meet.google.com.

Assuming you have G Suite, create a calendar resource for the room, then add the room to the invite.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1686462?hl=en

It's 2017 - quite 2018- and still can't set notifications for birthdays of my contacts lol please fix broken features before releasing redesign

The update doesn't seem to be rolled out to me yet.

It's on the G Suite blog, so I'm guessing it's for G Suite users first/only at this point.

Except the article says: "And if you use Calendar for personal use, click “Use new Calendar” in the upper righthand corner of the main Calendar view to get started."

Went to my calendar, and this isn't there at all. And will I get the option to go back, or is the old calendar dead?

It's there now, and yeah, there is an option to switch back (for now) under the gear menu.

Not a fan of the white text on colored background. I prefer black text on the colored event

Click the "gear" button and open up the "Density and Color" menu. You'll have the option to use the classic color set, which is black font on the colored event boxes.

Another wish of mine for google calendar is to turn on a confirm move dialogue. It is too easy to move an event accidentally, and because all the time documentation in the event gets updated, I lose the actual time of the event. I've taken to embedding the date and time into text describing the event. PIA

After youtube got a dark theme I had hope for more... guess not.

wht framework is it using?

Completely off topic, but am I the only won who things it's really wrong for google to have their own TLD?

I don't mind it. Be glad that ICANN didn't allow their proposal to own the name "search", with no second-level domain (i.e. https://search/): https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/google-wants-to-operate-se...

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