Gray's Matter - Airset gorilla-humps Google Calendar (Justice Gray's blog)

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.

Points in Airset’s favor

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.

Points in Google’s favor

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. ;)

Points against Google

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?

Friday, April 21, 2006

Comments [5] Personal | Technical |
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Gray's Matter [Trackback]
"Six months later, Airset *still* gorilla-humps Google Calendar" (Gray's Matter) [Trackback]

4/21/2006 5:33:26 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I have used AIRSET for quite some time, and I do like the reminders which are by far the most flexible that I've seen in an on-line calendar.

I much prefer the interface of google calendar though. RSS feeds I don't use, so that's a non-issue for me. I love the serach function for google calendar. I find the opening page of AIRSET as waste of time, since 99.9% of the time I want to go to the calendar. But with google calendar, you can set the default view. I like the fact that AIRSET has a yearly view, and google calendar doesn't. Against that though, with google calendar, you can select a given number of days on the small side calendar, and suddenly it shows up on the big calendar, so it is quite flexible in that respect.

AIRSET has todo lists, which google doesn't, although I don't expect that their calendar will remain with this shortcoming for too long into the future. Nevertheless, AIRSET has it today.

The contacts integration in google calendar is wonderful, and since my most complete contacts list is in google, this was a powerful point in their favor. AIRSET allows me to keep contacts, but I haven't had any use of them thus far, and it hasn't worked as seemlessly.

When it comes to the month to month, or view changes in google calendar, it is faster than AIRSET, and speed is important to me. But AIRSET gives too small sideline calendars instead of just the one that google gives.

AIRSET allows multiple calendars, but as far as I know, you can't display more than 1 calendar at a time, which is a bigh strength for google calendar. Google calendar has more rigid display with regards to the size of the day boxes which I like, but I can see this as being just a personal preference.

AIRSET nicely saves their calendar in iCal format, whereas google has no such export feature as of yet. I might add that this worked perfectly for me to download my calendar into my iPod nano.

A strength of google calendar is that you can search for calendars and add them to your calendar. So for example, I have the complete NFL schedule, the CFL schedule for my home team the WG Blue Bombers, and the world cup calendar in my google calendar. I also have a Forumla 1 racing calendar, movies and DVD release calendar, Canadian holidays calendar, and a few others, so it is a huge strength for google calendar. And you can turn them off or on with a single mouse click conveniently with a list of your calendars at the side. AIRSET has no such feature as far as I know.

For recurring events, AIRSET blows google calendar out of the water, for sure. There are types of occurances that you can do in AIRSET that would be impossible to set in google calendar, such as the first or last Thursday of the month - every 3 months for example. AIRSET really thought this thing through very carefully.

Since I am a GMAIL user, I like the integration with GMAIL, and the ability to create an event from GMAIL. I also like their quickadd feature in google calendar, even though I haven't actually used it that much thus far.

All in all, I would put google calendar as my first choice, but that is only because of some of the features that I like are more important to me. I still use my AIRSET calendar for some of the other reasons that I have pointed out, and certainly they have done a wonderful job.

One annoying thing that I don't like about the AIRSET calendar is the fact that I have to scroll to see the complete month view, whereas I never have to scroll to see it all in google calendar. But that's just my own personal preference. On the minus side, you can't see as much infor for a single day in month view for google calendar in that view, and for that reason, I often look at the next 2 weeks as a custom view. AIRSET has no custom view as google has. I wish though that google had 2 custom views.

Garry Burgess |dexarouskiesAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

4/23/2006 8:48:05 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I haven't used Airset but I've definitely played with some online event management apps. Upcoming.org is the most recent one that I've played with but I've disappointed with the feature set (even after Yahoo bought them up).

The biggest thing that I've looked for is the ability to generate an .ics feed from a calendar. I'm assuming that Airset has it but I definitely know that Google Calendar has it because that's the first feature that I looked for.

The ability to consume other .ics feeds (from iCalendarShare for example) is another capability that I'm looking for, but I'd probably only list it as a nice-to-have.

Highlander had it right - in the end there can be only one. After seeing the devastation that Google created in the webmail arena, I'm betting on them when it comes to the webcalendar as well. Airset might have more features for now but I doubt that they have the power and resources to compete for very long.

mike |mm53barAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

4/25/2006 4:59:00 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Airset has been around with a cool set of features , and I have been using the calendar for sometimes now. You gotta hand it to google they have the applied the the same functionality as that of gmail, and the calendar is very simple. With google coming in to this arena, there are lots of new services coming up, oen of them is zyb.com. They have a soft launch recently and have a cool contact & calendar sharing features. I could see more riders coming this way soon.

John |johaliasAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

3/30/2007 3:41:26 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I've been looking for a useful online calendar and have tried Google and Yahoo off and on for the last year or so. I need calendar/contacts sharing and collabroation tools for my team of teachers, who each need to be able to edit and add calendar and contact entries for all to see. The most important feature for me is a solid, reliable synchronisation with my laptop's MS Outlook, because I'm often out and about and not always connected to the Internet. Yahoo's Intellisynch worked OK for a while but other forums have warned me off it. Google is more set up for one-off import. Even the newer offerings like 30Boxes haven't got their act together here, which I find unbeleievably shortsighted. I think that the reason Airset has better features, such as recurring appointments and contacts, is because they mirror what Outlook does. I think this is because they have designed the product with proper synchronisation in mind. I also like Airset's other features like group-based sharing of files, links and lists.

Mike JC Smith |mikeAT NOSPAMmjcsmith dot net

1/22/2008 7:33:32 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Personally I see Airset as way too busy and I don't know if it's because I grew up in a Microsoft world but if I want to get tricky with the calendar use I can't for the life of me find out where to go. It's also the slowest Web app I've ever used. Google seems as though it preloads most of what it needs so it's instantaneous on very high-speed connections.

Curt

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