Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Sidebar Gadgets: Coming soon to a Calendar near you

We've always believed users should have open and unencumbered access to their data, and Google Calendar is no exception. Whether through iCalendar, CalDAV, or the Calendar Data API, there are a multitude of options to access Calendar from other applications. However, developers have been asking for a way to extend the Google Calendar interface itself, and we've been listening.

Today, as part of Google Calendar Labs, we're opening up Google Calendar as a gadget container.

Gadget developers will already be familiar with most of this environment, complete with features such as OpenSocial for social networking and OAuth for working with third-party services. However, for the first time we're also providing an API to control and interact with the Calendar user interface. This means that even though your gadgets are running inside a sandbox, they are first-class elements of the Calendar user experience. In fact, many of the experiments we've made available through Calendar Labs were written using the publicly available gadget API.

We hope you'll share our excitement in opening up the Google Calendar interface. To get you started, take a look at the Sidebar Gadget documentation and sample code. If you have any questions or ideas for improvement, feel free to visit the Calendar API help group and let us know!

14 comments:

  1. This is awesome feature. Thanks for this. But it would be better to show next event timings of at least two to three events.

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  2. This is really cool. I can't wait to see what new awesomeness comes out of this.

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  3. Siram: It wouldn't be difficult to publish your own gadget that shows extra events, like you describe. :)

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  5. when will libraries start using the google chrome browser? IE6 & IE7 are, well, just not friendly.

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  6. I guess this means someone can create a gadget for the "Extended" fields so that users can add their own fields to events. Is this correct?

    Though I wonder why Google Calendar doesn't offer this out of the box.

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  7. Looks like there's no support for Extended Properties: http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/docs/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html#ExtendedProps

    I got excited for nothing :(

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  8. Can I write something so I can get an event to repeat "on the last day of each month" or "the last weekday of each month", both traditional pay dates here in the old UK.

    Novell Groupwise (or Wordperfect Office as it was then) could do this back in '88.

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  10. Comment1: Don't like the World Clock widget being out all by itself on the right hand side.
    Comment2: I hope there will be a way to publish an individual event to a Blogger Google Calendar Widget.

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  11. I'd like to see this next event in my Gmail rather than my calendar ;)

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  12. I'm not a programmer, but I would hope to see a google gadget that makes a large calendar in which I can see a whole month, and the names of all-day events, similar to how people use hard copy calendars. You could see b-days ahead of time and deadlines better that way.

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  13. As a Google calendar user, I would like to be able to view and set the extended properties of an event, so that I can attach notes/report backs of the event right on the event.

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