Calendar

From 1-800-vista

1 Introduction
2 The main view
3 Sharing and subscription
4 Conclusion
5 More screenshots
6 Calendar FAQ (coming soon...)

Introduction

The new Windows Calendar application lets you create calendars for yourself and share calendars from others. The desktop application is easy to use and has many features similar to other popular applications such as Google Calendar or Apple iCal.

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The main view

Each user will have a default calendar and the application is simply launched from the main application menu (see Start Menu for more details). Once the application is started, you can edit information in one of the three panels of the main window. The left panel holds the date navigation tool - to select a month or a specific day-, the calendars groups and filter, and the tasks list. The middle panel shows the detailed calendar by day, week or month. And the rightmost panel is used to enter details information for your appointments. The left most panel let's you navigate to different date levels. Let's assume you're showing all days of the month. Then, when you click on the current date header (for instance, "August 2006"), the calendar goes up one level and shows you all months for the current year. The Windows Calendar developers have added nice transitions between date selections. Our calendar was able to show all dates between 1600 and 2399 which should be sufficient for majority of us.

On the rightmost panel shows the details of the current selected object. If a calendar is selected, the panel will show a drop-down box to select the calendar color. Some colors are predefined but you can easily change it to any custom color. When a subscription is selected, more options will be available. You will be able to define the update frequency of the external calendar. But, the most common view should be the events details where you can obviously change data such as the location, the start and end time of the event, the frequency and the participants. The panel also allows you to retarget any existing event to another calendar or associate an url to the event.

The calendar can be printed in a daily, weekly (or business weekly) and monthly format. Windows Calendar also has a number of options to customize the behavior of the application.

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Sharing and subscription

Beyond the basic functions, Microsoft has added two other nice features that many users will quickly learn to use.

Windows Calendar allows you to share calendars with the contacts you will have defined with the Windows Contacts application. Each calendar has its own color which is used to distinguish the events on the main window. The calendars can be organized into groups and check box on the left panel will filter information that you want to hide. The application can also import external calendars from the internet. Subscribing to an external calendar is simply a matter of entering the http address of the new calendar and if the file is correctly formatted, you will see a new entry into your application. Windows calendar using the iCalendar file format (file extension "ics") to communicate. This format is the "de facto" standard for calendar applications and used by many other applications such as Apple iCal, Korganizer or Google Calendar - see Wikipedia on iCalendar for more details. Finally you will also be able to import or export calendars in the ics format.

The second great function is the fast search engine that instantly shows events matching some keywords. This feature is quite intuitive and the results can be sorted by date or duration. The search box can be targetted to search only within a subset of your events such as the next 7 days or the upcoming month.

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Conclusion

Windows Calendar is a simple and useful application. With a default calendar application in Windows Vista, Microsoft will instantly create a large base of calendar users and you can expect that many of your friends will start sharing their home calendar in 2007. That should make your home computer more useful and interesting than ever.

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