Google’s new calendar has been released, amid the usual fanfare that accompanies one of their releases.  Maybe I’d be more impressed with this if I hadn’t been an avid user of Airset for the past couple of months, ever since Joel Spolsky mentioned it in passing on one of his blog posts.

As most people know, I’m a pretty busy guy and thus an online calendar app that Mrs. L and I can both use is very handy – especially with E-mail reminders! With this in mind, I thought I’d just list some pros and cons of Airset vs. Google Calendar so that you’re able to better decide whether or not Google Calendar is for you – they’re both free, so the price is right at least.

Note that since I originally wrote this, Google has re-tuned some points on their app - but I'll leave the comments in so you know what has been fixed and what still hasn't. 

• UI is a little smoother. I only really need to look at a week or month summary, so the additional 4-day scrolling thing doesn’t really do much for me.
• It is stupidly easy to enter appointments and requires no postback. Time/date selection is done using a javascript datepicker (Google uses 3 dropdowns, which I find time-consuming).
• RSS mania! Airset provides you with more RSS feeds than you’d probably even need. There is an RSS feed for the daily schedule, your next 7 days, the current month, etc. etc. Wonderful to get an overview of what’s going on, and works pretty efficiently as a reminder as well if you’re not using the E-mail reminders.
• Calendars can be shared publically and more than one user can come in and edit a shared calendar.

• You can move appointments simply by dragging them with the mouse. This is an advantage if you end up having to switch times and want a quick way of doing so. Airset requires you to edit the event itself.
• Uses the login from your gmail account, so no duplicate logins.
• You can change colors of the application very easily.
• Other than that, absolute jack. No, I’m serious. What does this calendar do better than Airset, other than quickly switch between color schemes?  When the most compelling feature of your calendar app is that you can switch CSS styles on the fly,  I'd probably pull it back out of beta. ;) 

• Not every event in my life is an all-day event. But apparently the people who use Google Calendar take 8-16 hours for appointments like a haircut or beating up JWerx for his lunch money. Why in the world would you default to an all-day event immediately? This means for pretty much every event I puit in the calendar, I have to unclick “all-day event” to see the menu with timeframes.  [Note: this has thankfully been changed to default to a 1 hour event].
• There’s an RSS feed, but goodness knows what it is actually tracking. I also can’t actually load the RSS feed through Firefox, so I have no idea whether it’s useful. Compare this to the RSS mania at Airset, for example.
• Lesser support for recurring events than Airset. In Airset, this is particularly easy to do, but in Google good luck figuring out how to do it.
• Reminders: I like getting reminders in E-mail from my calendar app. Both Airset and Google do this – correction, Google has an entry for reminders, but it doesn’t actually do anything. =)  Correction: there is a reminder - however, if you want to see it, you're going to need to leave Google Calendar open as it is a Javascript alert.  Since this thing is linked to the gmail account anyway, why not just E-mail the gmail account?  This one really boggles me as it seems rather trivial and a detail that I wouldn't have just left out.

As a software developer, I normally rate web apps on the “Would I want to be working at this company because of this project” scale. On that measure, Airset definitely gets a 10, while I’d say Google Calendar gets a 5 or so – I guess I just expected more considering it’s
Google.  Normally I'm not inclined to agree too often with F**kedGoogle, but his reaction pretty much mirrors mine in this case. 

Based on all this, I heavily recommend Airset to anyone who hasn’t tried it before!  That being said, has anyone else tried both apps to be able to offer an opinion?