X

An easy offline reader for Google Calendar

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
See full bio
Rafe Needleman

One of the biggest problems with Web-based applications is that they don't work when you're not online. As James Fallows notes, Web 2.0 becomes Web 0.0 if you don't have access.

Google Calendar is a great Web-based application, but if you want to use it when you're not connected to the Web, you're out of luck. Or are you? A Canadian startup, Time Search, has released an early public beta of Calgoo, an offline reader for Google Calendar. It downloads your appointments from Google onto your local PC, and has its own decent calendar interface.

At this early stage, the application is a bit rough. While the application supports multiple calendars (for example, you might want to use your calendar, your spouse's, and the baseball schedule), and can easily switch between them, I couldn't get it to actually display multiple calendars at the same time, which would be very useful. Also, it doesn't let you create appointments. Hopefully that function will be added in a future build.

I would like to see either more standalone apps like this, or better yet, micro local servers that run on our machines and synchronize with online data, so we can access our data no matter if we're online or off, using just one interface, not a different one depending on our connection status.

See also the new offline blog writer from Microsoft, Windows Live Writer.