The Unheard Word

Well, if Doug Bowman had a hand in the design of Google’s new public beta of Google Calendar and said it’s a really good application to use, even compared to iCal — that was good enough for me and I went to try it.

A big thumbs-down to Google because it doesn’t work (well, I stopped trying when I couldn’t add a date to an event) with Safari.

The only OSX browser supported is Firefox. I don’t like Firefox and am certainly not going to change my browser for the sake of an online calendar that I don’t even know I will find useful (and now probably will never find out). The Mac users who aren’t geeks (that is, most Mac users) won’t download Firefox just to use it for Google Calendar either. I guess there is a big, loud and clear message here from Google to Mac users. One of a long string of messages, actually.

It’s a good thing I really like iCal. And one thing I love about it is the way it integrates with many OSX applications. And, in the end, I want my information on my own computer, not on Google’s servers. I’m more comfortable with that, and (because of the OSX integration) it seems likely it works better for me in a practical sense.

(Windows users don’t have much of a choice either: Google Calendar only works on Windows in Internet Explorer 6 and above, and in Firefox. But most Windows users use IE6 — the default browser on Windows — and most Mac users use Safari — the default browser on OSX.)

Technorati Tags:
Mac OSX, OSX, Google, Google Calendar, Safari, iCal

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Web Design, Computers, Technology & the WWW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.