Smooth Calendar update not so smooth

Little widget with lots of info

I like my calendar widget to cram a lot of useful information into a tiny space. In my current setup my homescreen shows my next five appointments in a tiny 2x1 widget. This leaves plenty of space for more important things on my main homescreen, such as my music player widget.

The widget that comes with Jorte Calendar has more customization options than any other calendar widget. There's one problem, though. The Jorte widget opens Jorte Calendar when tapped, and there's no way to change that. As long as Jorte doesn't add custom reminder time entry to its calendar app I keep my appointments in Business Calendar Free. So I need another app to throw a calendar widget on my screen.

My current weapon of choice is Smooth Calendar. Its widget can be as big or as small as you like, there are plenty of ways to customize the calendar text, and lots of other options to tweak its appearance.

More options

A recent update added even more options to change the looks of Smooth Calendar.

The new Smooth Calendar removed the limits on how many calendar entries you could throw into your widget. More entries need bigger widgets, unless you make the text smaller. The update lets you choose your own font size, so you can put lots of small text into a tiny space, or big text into a big area. The amount of unused space around the widget text got reduced too, although Smooth Calendar still wastes valuable screen estate on the left side when you switch off the calendar color bar.

More goodies: separate layout settings for widgets in portrait and landscape mode, and a new widget background. Of course you can still leave the background transparent. The widgets are not scrollable yet, but who knows what future updates will bring?

Bugs ate the new features

Too bad the new features introduced a jungle full of new bugs. The option to select your own calendar app to launch upon tapping the widget broke, but was quickly fixed. Widget text can spill beyond the "original style" background, and this did not get fixed. Force-closes when choosing a background color for your widget remained a problem, too.

These issues (and others) resulted in a flood of negative Google Play Store comments, which were addressed by an update that removed most of the new features. The version that works for me is version 1.1.0.3, which has most the new features but not many of the new bugs. Unfortunately the current play Store version is v1.1.0.6, which has most new features removed in an attempt to squash the bugs. The Play Store doesn't let you roll back to older versions (something that Google should fix!). If you have an older version with the new features still in them and it doesn't keep crashing, hang on to your backups until the app gets sorted out.

• Smooth Calendar

Google Calendar needs tasks and more integration with the rest of Android

You can make Android apps talk with each other through the share menu, but that's not always enough. The calendar app that ships with Android is a prime example of something that needs more integration with the rest of the stock apps.

There are plenty of task managers out there in the Google Play Store to remind you to buy milk and beer, clean the bathroom, buy a bag of weed for your grandma who was young in the sixties, and to finish the paper that you should have published six months ago.

Many of those task apps and to-do services tap into Google Tasks.

Google Tasks gets really intimate with Google Calendar in your web browser, so why do they behave like strangers on Android?

Back when I used an old Nokia with Symbian, the calendar app included tasks, birthdays, and just about everything else to which you could stick a date. Google should have a good look at this old calendar app, and learn from it.

There are more opportunities for integration. My contacts list stores birthdays, weddings, and other anniversaries. So why does the stock calendar app doesn't know anything about the dates stored in my stock contacts app?

Some phones are tightly integrated with Facebook. Wouldn't it be nice if you could import the birthdays of your Facebook contacts into your Google calendar with a single tap on a button? Or does Google deliberately leave this feature out to switch to Google+?

Speaking of Google+, now here's an example of something that should not get mixed in with everything. I don't want to sign up with Google+ just so I can tell you what I think about your app in the Google Play Store.

As with all things Android, integration is good, but it should always be optional and never required.

Custom reminder times come for free in Business Calendar Free

Need to set a calendar reminder that makes noise 1h15 min before the appointment starts? What about two hours and a half so it doesn't start screeming during a meeting? Or any other time that the list of presets in the stock Google calendar app doesn't cater for?

Pocket Informant and CalenGoo can do it, but they want your money. If you were looking for a free calendar app with your own custom reminders you were out of luck.

But not anymore. Business Calendar comes in two flavors. There's a paid version without ads, and a free version with ads from AdMob. Of course with a rooted phone and an app like AdAway...

Business Calendar has a clean uncluttered interface. Its event entry screen has a narrow strip on the right side that shows how the appointment you're about to enter fits in the rest of your schedule. That's a very useful feature.

And the reminder time entry box has a "individual reminder" field that lets you enter any reminder time you like. Seventeen minutes, eight hours, three days and a half, two weeks, anything goes. Every calendar app should let you do this, but few do.

There's room for improvement, though. You can't set time zones, you can't make events repeat every other week (most competing calendar apps can't do that either), the widgets are nowhere near as good as those in Smooth Calendar or Jorte, the week view only shows days in columns, and the zoom function (great feature) works very well in week view but not in month view (where you need it more).

And the swipe gestures are a little inconsistent. The agenda view is a vertical list of entries, so you scroll through it with vertical swipes. That makes sense. Horizontal swipes to scroll through the days and weeks make sense too. But scrolling through the months requires a vertical swipe, because a horizontal move takes you to a "half week" layout. Vertical in agenda view, horizontal to scroll through days, weeks, and months, maybe a future update will make the scrolls and swipes more intuititive?

Business Calendar force closed and made my phone freeze a bit too often. If stability of the app goes up and the swipes get more consistent Business Calendar could become my default calendar.
Edit: a few updates killed the bugs. The force-closes are a thing of the past. Business Calendar is now my default calendar app.

• Business Calendar Free

Google Calendar behind the times

Task, memo, birthday integration

Back in my Symbian days I could schedule four types of events in the built-in calendar of my Nokia. Meetings, memos, anniversaries, and to-dos.

The advantages of having memos and to do lists integrated in a single app and a single widget are obvious. Anniversaries (birthdays etc.) could fit in one of the other categories, but having them as a separate type with a separate icon makes 'em easy to spot. And setting reminders is a lot easier too.

Reminders

Anniversaries last from midnight to midnight, but setting a birthday as an all day event in Google Calendar is not a good idea. Google Calendar can only handle reminders before an event, not during an event. If you want to be reminded of a birthday, Google Calendar only lets you set a reminder for the day before. Having the reminder sound on the day itself makes more sense, unless you want to call to say happy birthday on the night before. And you don't want to show up at the party a day early. Workaround: set a time for birthdays until Google wakes up and codes a fix.

More reminder issues: the Google Calendar app won't let you set your own reminder times. You can only choose from a list of presets that just doesn't cut it. Want to be reminded an hour and a half before an appointment? The list of presets only offers one or two hours in advance. Too late too make it in time, too early if you don't want your phone to ring a reminder in the middle of the previous meeting.

There's a way out, but it requires a trip to the Google Play store to buy Pocket Informant or CalenGoo. If you don't want to pay for a calendar app, point your web browser to calendar.google.com to set a custom reminder. If 3rd party apps and Googles own website are able to let you enter any reminder time you want, why can't the built-in calendar app do it? Custom reminder times could and should have been in the Android calendar app from day one.

Time zones

Enter the times of your flights, and risk missing your flight back home because Google Calendar shifts the times.

Airlines don't bother you with time zones. They just give you the departure and arrival times followed by a line that says "all times are local." They have a very good reason for that.

But Google Calendar times are tied to the time zone your phone was in when you entered the times. Your early morning flight to Europe moves six hours in your calendar when you arrive at JFK and the Android clock switches from CET to EST. If you're from Dublin and agree to meet your friend from Athens in a restaurant in Paris at 8 PM you better not let Google Calendar have its way, or you'll arrive at 9 and find your friend waiting since 7.

You could do the maths yourself and convert the times to compensate for your calendar drift, or switch off automatic time setting and manually change your clock (not your time zone) when you get out of your plane. It's how people used to change their watch before phones replaced watches.

Recent versions of the calendar app let you choose time zones for the start and end of an entry, but your calendar and its widgets will show the wrong time until you arrive in the matching time zone. You still have to do the conversion if someone across the ocean asks you at what time to pick you up at the airport. Or write the local times in the subject field instead of relying on your calendars erratic times. Or manually switch your phone to the destination time zone, and back.

Why enter time zones in your calendar? For international conference calls. Another reason: make your calendar wake you up in the middle of the night to watch Barcelona-Real Madrid in your japanese hotel room, because that's afternoon in Europe. If we add up conference calls and football games Google calendar still gets it wrong 99.99% of the time.

And it's so easy to fix! Just let us choose between time zone agnostic and time zone aware. The default behaviour of Google Calendar should be "all times are local unless I say they're not." It's how you'd write times in a paper calendar, and it matches the "all times are local" airline method. Let the 0.001% who fill their days with conference calls flip a switch in the settings to change their defaults instead of annoying everyone else.

Google, tell your calendar to adapt to people instead of the other way 'round.