Yahoo Calendar Beta: Disappointing!
Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/6rsah5
My primary email is Yahoo! Mail and therefore I have been dying to see the integration of Notes, Contacts, Calendar and Mail get better (After all, it has been years since Google calendar came out with AJAX). Unfortunately, Yahoo Calendar’s new Beta, released October 8th, is not even catching up to its already far-ahead competitors.
Features
Most of the feature enhancements are just replication of what has been on Google or other online calendar (e.g. 30 boxes or coming iScrybe) for over 2 years now.
- Multiple Calendars You can add multiple calendars much like anywhere else. Each calendar can be shared with multiple persons. Creating a new Calendar is one click operation. The calendars can be color coded and removed/added to a view with a checkbox. You can also subscribe to an iCal.
- One-Click Event A long-awaited improvement is events can be added with one click intutive interface similar to Google’s. It also lets you set reminder at the same time (see little icons). While adding Event, the view is scaled to show specific day in full (an idea probably borrowed from iscrybe).
- One Click Task Similar to one click Event, you can add tasks with one click. Completing the task moves it to the bottom of ‘completed tasks’ with a pop-up “Good Job!”
- Flickr View One cool or irritating feature depending on your attitude is Flickr View which is available only in Month
view of the calendar. When enabled, Flickr View displays random pictures from flickr for that day.
Why Disappointing?
Pretty much everything Yahoo! has done now with its calendar is what has been available for Google for a really long time. Yahoo still lacks a significant number of features to make it a viable alternative to others. Examples -
- No GTD (Getting Things Done) integration.
- No dragging and dropping events to task or vice-versa
- One-Click event addition is only possible for TODAY!! I am hoping this is just a bug. [Update] It is a bug as it works sometimes and stops working for no reason.
- I could not find any sync option with any of the offline Calendars or iPhone/Blackberry.
- Once you have setup an event, you cannot increase/reduce its duration by dragging the edges (which is possible while creating the event).
- No Task Priority, Due Data, sorting etc.
- Switching between the views is extremely slow.
- No context sensitive information (For example, now some calendars when added ‘Tom’s birthday’ would make it a recurring event by default).
Bottomline
Probably I am being too critical to a beta product. Yahoo! Calendar has significantly improved in features but it still has a lot of work to do to!
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