RIP Windows Calendar…Hello GMinder
Like many others have found out before me, Microsoft has removed Windows Calendar from Windows 7. Instead they’ve created a new client and integrated it with Windows Live Mail…Thats just fine and all, except that I use gmail’s web interface for all of my email (work and personal) and I don’t want another mail client to deal with when all I want is a calendar.
Where is the iCal-like application for Windows? I’m not asking for much:
- Windows-based Reminders – I need to know when its time to leave for an appointment or switch on the Blue Jackets game. Reminders that pop up in a web page are useless because I may not even be looking at that tab in my browser, at my browser, or even have the browser open (its rare but I do sometimes close Chrome out
) - Ability to easily add new appointments from the application
- Ability to see what appointments I have on an arbitrary day as well as a list of appointments for the day, next few days, or week.
Google Calendar would be great, except for item 1 above. That is built into their Google Talk client, and like I do with my many email accounts and Gmail, I use an IM client that supports all of the various IM protocols I use daily (MSN and ICQ for family/friends and GTalk for work).
Fortunately, I managed to stumble across GMinder a free, OSS, notification application for Windows which pulls its data from Google Calendar. I haven’t started using it yet, but I’m hopeful that it will fulfill my (rather basic) needs. People have been reporting that it doesn’t show the new Sports feeds that were recently added to Google Calendar, so it looks like I may need to dig through the source to fix that. I need to keep up on the Blue Jackets after all
Update: As I had somewhat expected, the issue with sports calendars is a ‘feature’ on Google’s part. The calendar doesn’t appear in the list provided by the gcal api and attempting to access it via the ID available on the calendar site results in an error. A simple google search and I found this page (expand sports) which states:
Keep in mind that it’s not possible to sync sports calendars with other calendar applications at this time.
bummer
