Google Calendar has a new look | Hacker News Reader

Google Calendar has a new look

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64 pointskenny_r27 comments

I am glad they decided to clean up the interface, but I think they made it too bright. Just looking at it my eyes hurt, and the black navigation bar adds even more contrast.

My favorite view is the WEEK view, but I've found it annoying that it doesn't provide a full day review without scrolling (I only see 13:30 - midnight without scrolling).

Furthermore the actual calendar covers only about 2/3 of the window's height, the rest are double navigation and search bar. Isn't that a waste of space?

Otherwise I love Google Calendar and use it every day. I just want it even better

I am glad they decided to clean up the interface, but I think they made it too bright

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yup ... my first reaction this morning was

"oh my god this is so awesome!" ... then it was

"wait ... I can't see the text in tasks that I mark as done" ... "It's not immediately clear what day it is any more" and "why is the contrast so low ... its hard to make out the gridlines"

So yeah ... everything kind of cancelled out ... the idea of the design is nice, but I think they dropped the ball on imnplementation in certain places.

Definitely agree with the day & space points. Need to show more of the day, and more calendar. that search bar is fracking huge

The search bar is ridiculously large, especially given how rarely I suspect most folks actually run searches against their calendar. I'm sure some people are doing it constantly but if I've even done it once I'd be surprised.

There's an awful lot of unused horizontal space in that black bar. Seems like a good location for a search box.

I'm never one to shy away from change but all of Google's recent changes are causing me to become quite flummoxed. Not because they're bad changes but because Google has in the past been so change-adverse and to now be met with multiple design refreshes within 72 hours is just causing my head to spin.

I know I'll get used to all the changes sooner rather than later but right now I can't help but sit on some nostalgia for the old and plain Google of just >72 hours ago.

Kudos Google, but please, be kind to my slowing brain. =)

It seems to me that they are trying to update the interfaces to look more similar with Google+ and make them pixel perfect across all their applications.

That's why I think it is good to see all the apps change in a short time span, which makes it easier to get over the changes.

There seems to be some change regarding how they push updates and new features/designs to the world. I remember it took months of testing before they decided that the current search bar at google.com (wider and larger) was good enough. Now they really are pushing total UI revamps in 2 days.

It definitely has to do with Larry Page.

It is bad. The main problem (besides the black toolbar which blights every new design) is that full day events are black text on the calendar's color (e.g. green). This would be fine if I could select a light color, but the timed events are on a white background. So I can read one, or the other, but not both. Why get rid of the white text for full day events?

The create button looks gimmicky and cartoonish as well. I feel like this is the result of UX testing gone terribly awry. A bunch of individual metrics (how long till a user can figure out how to create an event, how long till a user can identify which page they are on, etc.) without a coherent aesthetic to bind it or any other holistic thinking beyond "make it the same across all devices".

> Why get rid of the white text for full day events?

For me, it still displays full day events in white text if I select a dark color like green, and only uses black text for light colors. The only minor problem I see is that it also uses the light color I selected for timed events, which could make them a bit difficult to see on the white background.

> The create button looks gimmicky and cartoonish as well.

It reminded me of Gmail's "Compose mail" button (which is located similarly), and don't quite understand how it looks gimmicky or cartoonish in comparison. Because it's red? I would argue it makes sense to make the most important button on the site a flashy color, but I guess it comes down to a matter of taste.

Overall, I think this is Google unifying their services and making them look more alike. Google+ is more than just another social attempt, but rather the beginning of Google bringing its services together, which seems like a smart move in countering Facebook by their new CEO.

It is like there is 10 years of pent-up design at Google that has been released all in the last week.

Downgrade. Everything is hard to read; why is it necessary to use light grey text on a white background? The week view requires scrolling to view all hours of a day (even though it only shows just 1 extra hour). In the week and 4-day view, its very hard to see the vertical separators that separate between days. The widgets on the left are all blurred together, and navigating between different months on the sidebar is done via two very tiny light grey arrows on a white background (again.)

This is just change for the sake of change without any user experience improvement.

It looks like the favicon is now the day of the month too.

(quite possible that it was always like this, or that it just always shows 30 and it just works because that is the count of today. I honestly never noticed before though.)

They launched it on Calendar's 5th anniversary in April.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?fid=02...

haha! Thanks for the info.

Can we PLEASE lose the paper-on-desk metaphor and have a 7 day calendar that always shows the next 7 f&*!@##! days!

Calendar does have a custom view, which defaults to showing the next "4 Days" (hint), available in the bar at the top of the calendar view. You can change it to 7 days if you like in the settings (gear -> Calendar settings -> General -> Custom view).

I'm starting to appreciate the black bar more and more. At first I was skeptical, but it fits their new designs pretty well.

That's the worse part of their design so far. The gray text is hard to read and the black bar is distracting on a otherwise light page.

> gray text is hard to read and the black bar

That's a conscious design choice.

In the visual hierarchy on the page, the links at the top are secondary to the main content. So it's better to have them faded out so your eyes aren't drawn to them.

Fading out the links is all well and good, but that only works when the bar itself doesn't draw your eyes to it. On my browser (uncostomized Google Chrome), it is by far the most distinctive element on my screen.

I find Facebook's blue header far more distracting than Google's dark grey one. But noone really complains about that. Maybe because they are used to it.

And it is beautiful!

It is albeit, a little hard to differentiate days.

I don't like the left sidebar on new Google calendar. The widgets don't have a clear distinction anymore.

This bugs me too. Further, it seems part of a wider change that you see in Honeycomb where all unnecessary lines and background colors are removed. It makes things look very plain and unstructured, it's hard to tell where one thing starts and another ends and there are very few visual cues about interactions you can have with the elements.

I think they're trying to fight against the "Apple is simple and easy, Google is complicated and hard" feeling. But it's not just an equation of how many lines and colors you have. At some point removing things increases complexity if it makes your brain work to understand what is on the page.

Left sidebar and search field are crunching the calendar, the actual thing I'm using, into a corner on my Gateway EC1803U netbook. I'm pretty sure the left sidebar can be assimilated into the row of shit under the search field.

Given how much space the non-calendar part takes, I'm also surprised as to how little content fits in it. In the old calendar, the left sidebar was [in my standard browser side] big enough to show 6 "My" calendars and 5 "Other" calendars, with blue borders cleanly delineating the sections, and colored backgrounds making it easy to visually link calendars' names to their events.

Now, the left sidebar, in addition to wasting ton of space, separates sections only by slight vertical gaps, makes almost no use of color, and displays [same screen size] 2 of "My" calendars, and 2 "Other" calendars.

The generally garish color changes, I could live with. Mushing the UI components together into a sea of whitespace, making them less distinctive, and wasting most of the screen, on the other hand...

The create button only creates events ... would have thought it'd give you the option to create tasks as well

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