I’ve been using 30 Boxes for a while now, but I was intrigued at the release of Google Calendar. The support for GCal in the developer community seems to be much greater than any of the other web-based calendars, which makes sense given Google’s prolific presence in the online world.
I made a post a little while ago that described some of my initial impressions of GCal; this post is going to focus on what elements of Google Calendar 30 Boxes needs in order to form an übercalendar.
Third Party Support
Within GCal’s short lifetime, it has already given life to a Firefox extension and a Quicksilver plugin (check your QS prefs to grab it.) While 30 Boxes seems to have support for developers, there have not been many results to speak of. The Themes section of their website is sorely lacking, and a quick Google search for Firefox extensions turns up completely irelevant results.
I want some third party support for 30 Boxes. It’s an amazing app, but it could definitely benefit from outside help.
Access Keys
Pressing a modifier in order to activate access keys is so 2005. I love zipping around Gmail and GCal with just a few presses of the keyboard. Maybe someone could write a Greasemonkey script for this, but the keys need to be default to the app itself.
Calendar Views
GCal’s Agenda view is pretty nifty, and 30B needs a week and proper day view that is accessible from the main page. Just having the month view can get pretty stale after a while. In fact, the 30B interface could stand to take a few lessons from Google. Sure, GCal is a bit cluttered, but the settings page is way more efficient than the 30B version.
… And Vice Versa
And now that I have lambasted 30B, here are some awesome things that Google needs to implement:
Tags
This could be the factor that determines whether or not I switch over to GCal. Google, multiple calendars is cool and all, but we need tags. Now.
RSS Feeds / Overlays
This is one of my favorite parts of 30B. I love seeing bookmarks and photos from buddies.
Social Aspects
30B was built to be a social app from the beginning, and it shows. The way that buddy calendars overlay onto your own calendar is ingenious. I haven’t done much with the sharing on GCal, but I know that event invites and additions in 30B is a breeze.
I know that 30B is actively working on implementing new features (and by actively, I mean, can someone tell the 30B guys to get a test server? This night testing beta feature thing is driving me insane!), and I’m sure that Google is, too. We as end users can only benefit.