Syncing Google Calendar on your iPhone can be a nuisance more than a benefit. Bookmarking Google Calendar mobile isn’t any better. As a web app it lacks offline support. Using CalDAV to sync Google Calendar doesn’t give you the full capabilities of Google Calendar. So what do you do? Readdle has released the answer to this nightmare and it’s called Calendars.
Calendars Layout
Calendars loads into a nicely styled but standard Calendar layout. With multiple calendar support, you can see your schedule in:
- List View
- Day View
- Week View
- Month View
You can make changes to events on the fly by dragging and dropping events in every mode except List. Readdle makes up for this in List view with a speedy search bar. Holding the bottom right corner of an event in “Day” view will allow you to quickly extend or shorten meeting times. A status bar notification appears when changes are saved and allow you to undo any mistakes. These changes are also reflected in Google Calendar .
Switching between months is as simple as tapping an arrow or quickly finger sliding through a list of months. Tapping the calendar icon in the lower right corner of the app will bring you back to reality (today).
Creating An Event With Calendars
Calendars by Readdle is equipped with every feature you’d see in Google Calendar to create an event. To start you can tap a space in the layout you’re viewing a quick add. From there you can edit details or simply press the “+” icon in the top-left corner.
Aside from the standard what, when, and where fields you can also add:
- Set as an all day event
- Select calendar event should be on
- Set a reminder
- Add a description
- Invite attendees from contacts, history, or manually
- Set event to repeat everyday, week, 2 weeks and more
You can also choose which calendars you’d like to load into the app. Calendars includes offline support for your Google Calendar account.
What’s Missing
Calendars isn’t without its quirks. Initial load and sync times can takes a minute or two. I hope to see support for Google Tasks is on their road map. Landscape viewing support would be nice also for those with a packed agenda. My last wish for this app may be a stretch on the iPhone, but I’d love to access to my Google contacts for inviting attendees or maybe integration with Tungle.me.
These quirks aren’t make or breaks on my list of app requirements. Calendars also eases the headaches that I’m all too familiar with when using the native iPhone Calendar app. Calendars is on sale for the next day for only $.99. In fact, all of their products on are on sale for a buck and they are giving away 3 iPads. Today is your lucky week because Calendars is very much worth your dollar.
