Rave about a new Google Gadget

About two weeks ago, it appears, Google made public a new gadget for adding a Google Calendar to the Gmail side nav bar. I decided to try it out, since I'm a frequent user of both Gmail and Google Calendar.

I have to say...I am a fan of that little gadget! It seems like it was pretty well thought-out. It gives you a day agenda view, and when a scheduled event ends, it is faded in the calendar. Also, clicking on an event will take you automatically to the details of that event, which is something I'm disappointed about with the normal Google Calendar, where you have to double-click to get to event details and it takes you away from the rest of the monthly calendar to a new page. Sometimes that seems to take longer than it should, and the gadget makes that transition nice and quick.

Normally, a month loads at a time, but if you scroll down to the end of the month, it will load the next month, and if you scroll to the end of that month, it will load another, and so on. There is also an option to load a mini monthly calendar, and that allows you the ability to quickly jump to a date by clicking on the date in the monthly calendar, rather than scrolling through all the dates, as well as letting you go back in time to view dates that have already passed (that was a concern of mine when I was testing it out earlier this week, and I'm glad that there is a way to time-travel...on the calendar).

I haven't noticed any major problems or glitches yet with the gadget. My only complaint would be that adding details to a new event leads you to a new window or tab (browser-dependent), and ideally I'd love for it to merely expand the new event box that pops up when you click on "add". Then again, the same thing happens in the original Google Calendar. At least they're being consistent. I'm just happy I don't have to keep two tabs open for these two applications now. It's nice to have it all in one spot.

There is also a gadget for Google Docs, which I also added, but as it's not yet something I use often, I won't go on raving about how awesome it is. Again, though, it's still neat to keep everything on one page. If you use any of the applications, I highly recommend trying your hand with the new gadgets.