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> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm using multiple Google Calendar accounts just fine with the built-in Calendar app.

> We currently are a calendar widget, but we're now branching out of the calendar space to become a unified notification inbox.

So basically, a calendar widget and a notification center (which is already a part of the OS)?

> Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

Dog you can sync Google calendar with your built in calendar then run Next Meeting[0] in your menu bar. You can even have a global shortcut to open the meeting link. All my work meetings are in scheduled through Google Calendar and take place in zoom, and all I do is hit Hyper-Z[1] to open the correct meeting link.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/next-meeting/id1017470484?mt=1... [1] Hyper being Cmd-Opt-Shift-Ctrl which is remapped to one key on my keyboard. You can make it anything you want, obviously. My point is I don't even have to touch my mouse to get into the meeting.

Can you elaborate on mapping a keystroke to opening a meeting link? Outside of google cal + google meet calendar apps don’t typically recognize meeting links as something to promote.

Sure. When we create meetings in Google Calendar (in the desktop browser; never tried anywhere else) we can add a video conferencing link to the invitation. These can either be a Google Meet link, or a Zoom meeting link (through our Zoom integration with Google Calendar). I have linked macOS's Calendar.app with Google Calendar. In Calendar.app this link is still present inside of the calendar event in the LOCATION field[0] although you can't actually see or edit it in there, odd. Then Next Meeting makes a drop down menu in my menubar where the title is the name of my next meeting. Clicking any of the items in the menu opens Calendar where I need to click the Zoom link in the text of the description of the meeting. However if I hit my shortcut key (with or without Next Meeting's menu open) it opens up the meeting link in the browser which then, in JS, does something like

    window.location = `zoommtg://us02web.zoom.us/join?action=join&confno=${meetingIdFromUrl}`

thusly opening my meeting in zoom. I'm guessing that all Next Meeting does is run the command line utility `open` with the contents of the LOCATION field from the ICS file corresponding to the entry. Actually I looked at the version history and since it used to always open them in Chrome that's probably not the case. Also I tried to write an app that would call command line utilities and it was a bear to get the permissions. Possibly impossible.

The only public code[1] I could find for this project by this author is 13 years old and lacks any code to open the meeting links or handle hotkeys of any kind. The github user has a different name than the project author (who has his own empty github profile elsewhere) so

[0] In fact we can see this by using a recursive grep in ~/Library for the name of one of my meetings. This turned up ~/Library/Calendars/<some UUID>.caldav/<some other UUID>.calendar/Events/<Unique identifier in a format I don't recognize><ISO 8601 timestamp>@googlecom-<different ISO 8601 timestamp>.ics

[1] https://github.com/imagine/nextmeeting

For just the tiniest part of a second I held hope that you were Sequoia Capital and you were very cross that this project existed. I see now that you are not. This whole thing is still hilarious.

> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

Calendar.app works fine with GCal though (notifications, accepting/cancelling invites, etc.). I still go through the Web UI to create invites and what not (because I want my automatic zoom meeting and decent scheduling tools), but that happens seldomly.

As a reference: Creative Cloud Photography Plan Includes Lightroom with 20GB (or more) of cloud storage, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop. US$ 9.99/mo

Do you think you provide value in the range of Photoshop, Lightroom and 20GB online storage?

If not, please revise your pricing. I would gladly pay $10 for your app once (!). But surely not monthly.

> I understand for pricing purposes we're on the higher end, as mentioned in the note, this is intentional to validate we provide enough value

What exactly do you mean by "validate we provide enough value"?

> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

Huh? I’m using the native calendar app all the time since I got my first macbook 7 years ago. I was using google calendar before and it was seamlessly migrated. I am using multiple google accounts and also the icloud account for calendars, never had a problem. It syncs back to google and between different devices, it works with inviting other people and so on.

The only feature that google calendar UI does better is help to find a scheduled time. But I always agree for a time before creating a calendar event, so that’s not something I’d miss. Also, it generates the google meet link, which is again useless since I use zoom or whereby. But even if I wanted that, I’d either have to use the google calendar UI or an app that replicates this feature.

What I nice about the native macos calendar app is that it does natural language parsing, for example, “Meet with X on Monday at 12” will create “Meet with X” event and set the date to the closest Monday, the time to 12:00 and duration to a default 1h. It’s basically like you’re making a note, but it becomes a calendar event.

> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work.

Why didn’t you just connect your Google calendar to Apple Calendar and keep using Apple Calendar?

> Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

My company uses Google for calendar but I still use the native Apple Calendar app on both macOS and iOS. Am I missing something groundbreaking that requires using GCal natively?