Saturday, November 21, 2009

Sneak Preview in Google Calendar

I got invited to try out a new feature in Google Calendar called Sneak Preview that allows you to simultaneously preview your friend's calendars while creating an event. Currently in Labs, the "Free or busy" gadget already allows you to check the present availability of your friends but when scheduling an event, you would still need to go to a future date, cross check your friend's calendar to make sure that all of your guests are free during a particular time before creating the event.

With Sneak Preview, you would be able to preview your friend's calendar on a new mini-calendar in the Create Event screen. This makes scheduling events much easier by allowing you to see when people are free and if the proposed time would conflict with existing events. Here's a screenshot of Sneak Preview in action:

Google Calendar Sneak Preview
The proposed event time is highlighted with a translucent shaded box (which is also drag-able). As you add guests to your event, their calendar would show up and you can see their events along side your own calendar. Roll over to their events and details would pop up.

This feature, however, might not be as useful to users who own several personal calenders (e.g. one for work and one for personal) as it currently only shows your default calendar.

If you're invited to test the new feature, you should see a link in your Create Event page:
Google Calendar Sneak Preview Invitation

Do you think this feature would make creating events easier?

4 comments:

George B. Moga said...

"This feature, however, might not be as useful to users who own several personal calenders" - I can see all my calendars and enable/disable them at will.
Also, I don't see where you got the Idea the feature is called "Sneak preview"...
http://exde601e.blogspot.com/2009/11/new-event-scheduler-in-google-calendar.html

Unknown said...

Hi gxg,

May you tell us how you are able to enable and disable your other calendars at will? Because I still can't do so with several calendars I own.

Also, as seen from the screenshots above, it says "Turn on sneak preview" and the retractable tab is also titled as "sneak preview". So I'm pretty sure the product is called Sneak Preview.

George B. Moga said...

You're right that the feature doesn't display all calendars, my mistake.
But it works with any of them: e.g. if you create the event in a secondary calendar (not the default one), it displays the events and conflicts within this calendar. You can also turn it off, if you like.

techprism said...

Thats so Cool. Could you send me an invite too?

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