There’s some nice movement taking place in the online calendaring world right now, and the fact that Google is throwing its 800-pound gorilla weight around sure helps raise the stakes!

I’m increasingly migrating my stuff over to Google calendar, which means moving from casual experiments to increasingly rely on it for real. It has numerous great capabilities, style, and approach that have been commented on at length elsewhere, so I won’t repeat any of that, but just wanted to add a little twist of my own.

Via a recent Stowe Boyd posting I found out about Elias Torres’ Google Calendar Quick Add Firefox Extension, which makes it that much simpler to add that little ‘Dinner w John Sculley Tue 8pm’ line we’ve all been so eager to do since Mr Knowledge Navigator himself launched the Newton Message Pad onto the world many moons ago.

This is NOT to be overly cynical about the benefits of being to add ‘intuitive one-liners’ to you calendar: Google Calendar’s quick-add really does work if you’re even moderately cooperative about using it nicely (sure, you can fool it, but that’s not the point) .

But it does trigger some thoughts, sketched out below.

The widget challenge and some past experience with natural language calendar input

About 10 years ago, former KMi superstar Stuart Watt and I experimented with super-quick meeting scheduling tools that relied on just email and natural language input. The idea was that you could email a tentative scheduling ‘suggestion’ to your relevant friends and colleagues, and CC it to one of Stuart’s Intelligent Agent tools (called Luigi), and the agent would mediate the booking arrangements!

The bad news is that people don’t really like agents mediating their arrangements — though even this had its upside, because the realisation led us to develop the agent-free Meetomatic that just uses a dumbed-down (and highly popular, I might add) click-the-dates-and-show-me-the-big-constraint-table interface. The good news is that Stuart wrote a fantastic date parser for Luigi, that let you type in all sorts of nice and intuitive expressions to schedule your meetings, e.g.

“Next Tuesday 10am-4pm”
“Thu 25th 8-1″

etc. You would enter these one per line, in a plain vanillla email (that also described the purpose of the meeting, the venue, etc), CC it to Luigi, and Luigi would handle the rest. This parsing side of the work was very promising, so naturally I’m very happy to use Google Calendar’s Quick Add capability, since it ‘does the right thing’ enough of the time, given the caveat about being a cooperative user.

The challenge

But the quick add capability does not address a very common situation I find myself in, hence this challenge, with I think is pretty easy: I receive an email message, and somewhere in the subject line or body of that email is a short piece of text saying something like

“Seminar by X, on Tuesday, 23rd May, 12:30PM in the Lecture Theatre”

Usually there are relevant URLs included, and (rarely) an iCal “add this to my calendar” link. But what I want is simply this capability:

1. I highlight the segment [Tuesday, 23rd May, 12:30PM] with my mouse
2. I click the right-mouse button
3. Up pops a context menu with several choices offering me the option to ‘do the right thing’, including (of course) add this to my Outlook calendar, add this to my Google Calendar, add this to all my calendars, or any other user-settable action I have provided to the menu tool.

So, I don’t require any software to determine where the right text is! I’m happy to do that.

Note that I’m fussy: I only want to engage in an absolute maximum of 3 mouse actions: highlight, right-click, ‘do it’. Even great tools such as Quick Add require you to do more, or they require the text to be embedded in a Gmail so that relevant actions can be displayed on the right. I’m thinking of something more general that would give you a choice of user-settable actions.

Anyone want to give this a shot, or point me to an existing solution?

[QUICK UPDATE: forgot to mention if you try the exact example above,
"Seminar by X, on Tuesday, 23rd May, 12:30PM in the Lecture Theatre"
then with Elias's plugin you can do the following:
1. Highlight all that text
2. CTRL-C (copies);
3. CTRL-; (pops up quick add plugin)
4. CTRL-V (pastes your text)
5. Hit the RETURN key, and the entry is in your Google Calendar, correctly.

Hmm... as a keyboard junkie and ex-EMACS fanatic, I have to admit that little keyboard sequence is pretty damn quick. My challenge still stands, however, as it has other more generic uses.]

Technorati Tags: calendar, google.calendar, firefox, quick.add, natural.language, parsing, sculley, knowledge.navigator

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