Google Calendar’s Fatal Flaw
by Kevin Dangoor
I want to use Google Calendar, because it has a nice UI and I can access it from everywhere. There is one small thing that keeps me from switching from iCal: “sticky” notifications. Â It’s not a complicated feature. When I reach the reminder time for an appointment, iCal will pop up a window that stays there until I dismiss it (either by closing it or by telling it to remind me again later). If my computer was sleeping, that window will pop up as soon as the computer wakes up again.
Google Notifier for the Mac can pop up reminders, but they only hang around for a few seconds, and I don’t think you’ll see a notification at all if your computers are off at the notification time. I might be able to fashion something in Apple Mail where it uses Growl to display a sticky notification for messages from Google Calendar. Unfortunately, though, Google Calendar doesn’t seem to have a way to send an email notification to any address other than my gmail address for a given appointment.And I had a really hard time figuring out where to send in a feature request to the people who maintain Notifier. So, we get a blog posting instead and a hope that the lazyweb will somehow come through.Â
For our group, it is an important feature to be able to notify other email addresses on a calendar event. I hope we see this feature in the near future! This is preventing further use of the calendar, although we are pleased and impressed with the ability to create multiple calendars that can be turned on/off.
There is a gmail+growl plug-in for notifier, but it doesn’t register a google calendar event. If it did, then GROWL can be set to make that event sticky… That seems the path of least resistance.
Ok, so there is a rube-goldbergesque solution to this…
#1 – install gmail+growl for google notifier
#2 – create a label for google calendar notifications
#3 – create a filter to automatically label incoming notification emails.
#4 – using the preferences editor cmd+option while clicking preferences on google notifier add the key Filter with a value of your new label.
#5 – in growl preferences, set gmail+growl notifications as sticky
Wow. That is rube goldbergian, but that would indeed work. Thanks for the suggestion (and I still hope Google will fix this themselves).