I recently started using iCal more often because of all the excellent teleseminars & courses I’ve been signing up to attend. I am rather scatterbrained so remembering stuff (even stuff I want to do) is a little difficult for me. I’m notorious for forgetting about doctor appointments and even classes I’m teaching.
iCal is fantastic because I can sync it with my iPhone and it’s generally easy to use.
However, I use Gmail for all of my e-course/teleclass registrations.
So in order to remember the date, time & call-in info, I had to open iCal, create a new event, type in all the information.
Despite how easy it is to add events, it’s still way too many steps, and I’d often forget to add them.
So one day I looked at the upper right hand corner of my Gmail screen when I had an event confirmation email open, and there was a link right there asking me if I wanted to add the event to my Google Calendar.
Until then, I hadn’t really used it, but that got me thinking.
So I created my event!
Great. Now what?
I have to check Google Calendar too? Ugh. Too much.
A few days went by and I read that I can sync Google Calendar with iCal – so I did (and wrote an article about it). This now means I can sync with my iPhone and get notifications through iCal.
Excellent!
So now I have iCal & Google Calendar synced.
But there’s still the issue of adding events – sometimes Gmail doesn’t have that handy “Add to Google Calendar” link, and again, the process of adding events through iCal still takes too many steps (and I don’t want to fuss with Automator or yet another helper application).
So then I re-discovered Google’s notifier – I have the Gmail notifier running but didn’t realize that there’s one for Google Calendar as well. I quickly installed it and found the best thing ever: Quick Add Event.
Google Calendar Notifier
What’s so good about this feature of the Google Calendar notifier? I type in “Tonight 9PM dinner with the Grahams at Ted’s” and it will translate perfectly into a calendar event in Google Calendar. Even “Tomorrow” and “Thursday noon” will create events on the proper days.
Cool, huh?
And I’m truly OK with Google taking over the world…
