SpongeCell is a new Ajax calendar built on the Ruby on Rails platform. In addition to the now-ubiquitous drag and drop interface, Spongecell is adding artificial intelligence aspects to turn natural language into structured calendar entries, and has a nice mobile interface. More information is here. Spongecell is having an open launch party on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 in San Francisco.
Ajax calendars are faily commonplace now (they are kissing cousins to Ajax home pages as far as I’m concerned) and seem to be breeding just as prolifically. My list now includes:
And where are Google, Yahoo and MSN? Somehow I have to believe they are working on this stuff.
Steve, I love the fact that you are just getting up, blogging already, and I’ve yet to go to bed. The next few hours are all yours.
planzo.com is an interesting one
Agreed with aaron. I have tried some of the others but find planzo.com the best. It is not much to look at but it works. I used Trumba for awhile but prefer Planzo.
At Webmail.us, we bundle an Ajax calendar with our email hosting product. And just this week we started including it for free with Webmail Lite (http://www.webmail.us/lite).
Consider also Joyent (http://www.joyent.com ), as part of the mail+calendar+contacts+discussion space.
Thanks for the review. Still looking for an online calendar with a smooth good looking interface. Perhaps that’s what is taking Google so long in releasing their’s.
I say this with every ounce of snarkiness I can muster:
How the hell can you have a Web 2.0 product and embed that much text in images??
WTF. You want people to find your app and find it usable? You’ve got a closed door on search bots and spiders.
Didn’t TechCrunch write about http://www.zimbra.com before? Don’t they fit into this category? I’ve not used it, but I sat through the flash demo of how it works/what it does.
Has any one of these attempted to resolve all the issues around time zones? ie Changing times automatically if the user is travelling and/or the others who are viewing the events live in different times zones and so need the adjusted times and dates automatically presented to them.
See Stowe Boyd’s recent rant – Calendars Don’t Work (and my comment):
http://www.stow...dars_dont_.html
Either these “calendar companies” are not interested in gaining users from Europe or they all just keep forgetting to add an option to set Monday as a first day of week. It just looks weird to me to have Sunday at the very left side of the calendar. This is the third AJAX calendar app I’ve seen not having this feature at all.
It’s time for a Techcrunch name contest. Naming is hard these days, but there are some great ones and there are some horrible ones.
Can somone just release a simple open source one of these so i can drop it into one of my apps?
I hope they build in good integration points to hook these calendars into the desktops. As a end user, I would want to view/manage my calendar from within netvibes (my preferred desktop) than to have to go to different websites for my calendaring needs. I hope application developers have widgets/gadgets in their near-term roadmap. That would also be the quickest approach to building a large userbase.
Holy crap. How can these developers announce a product that is so obviously in very early stage development?
Usability is close to 0, it honestly looks bad compared to other solutions out there, and I can’t see the value of a pre-packaged stand-alone online calendar solution anymore. I’m sorry, but this is my honest opinion.
But, they do have the fashionable launch party, so what do I know.
Fred: You forgot that it isn’t even compatible (makes it crash) with Safari yet, though they are upfront about it.
It gets into that whole when to launch thing, but I would still err on the conservative side than the alpha side.
where does HipCal fit into this whole thing, i thought it was AJAX or ruby or something.
I just love this ajax hype, everyone is blogging about it. I can’t wait to see an ajax calender replace the famous outlook/exchange combination.
It doesn’t seem to handle recurring events. (e.g meeting every wednesday at noon)
It has been TechCrunch’d:
Application error
Rails application failed to start properly”
Another vote for Planzo. I am slowly becoming a big fan of that site. SMS reminders too!
This looks like a potentially dangerous security risk, if you ask me. Break into the calendar to learn exactly who will be where when. When your house will be empty. When you will be home alone. Maybe even when you will be walking around in a dark and secluded place.
I wonder if anyone but me thinks of these things…
Am I wrong (missing the link) or do we sign-up for Web 2.0 apps sight unseen???
I just can not get excited about this without a single screenshot showing me how wonderful looking this app is??? Mind you their sponge icon is nice, but c’mon.
You should also consider Plans – http://www.planscalendar.com/ – its a very good full featured calendar.
No one gets it. We don’t need another Ajax calendar. A calendar can do so much more!!
A true Web 2.0 calendar is going to break convention of what a calendar is. It’s not about keeping track of your time or events, that’s obvious. It’s about everything else. I’ll leave it at that.
Interesting. Not sure if NLP is any use to me though – is anyone leveraging structured blogging/microformats for these purposes yet?
I was excited to see that spongecell can import iCalendar events, but unfortunately only by uploading a file from the file system.
Our Nuvvo eLearning Service, http://www.nuvvo.com/, publishes events in iCalendar–but our users are not likely going to download the file and then upload it. They would have to do this everything their events change, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose. You should be able to subscribe to a URI of iCalendar events.
Michal, regarding the start day of the week–you might be pleased to know that our Nuvvo calendar will change between Monday and Sunday depending on your language.
Colin, all the dates in Nuvvo are stored internally using the Java Date object, thus we are always respectful of time zones, and all dates are rendered correctly for the viewer depending on their chosen time zone. I don’t know much about Ruby on Rails, but wouldn’t it have a similar facility? Doesn’t everyone do this?
I just tried this calendar out, and like Kiko, I just don’t see the point. It might as well be a desktop app for all the advantage it takes of being online — you can’t subscribe to iCal files, so it’s basically useless.
I’ve been using Airset for a couple of months now, even though it’s got a pretty horrible interface, just because it gives me publish and subscribe for iCals, and it does SMS notifications (which is the only kind of notification I ever use).
For me Hipcal (http://www.hipcal.com) takes he cake as the most user-friendly online calendar application out there. Just beats me why it doesn’t get the kind of hype all these other applications are getting!
Google will be launching this soon.
Why all these calendars with such identical feature sets? Where’s something that can, for example, handle multiple tracks or rooms (like for planning a conference)? How about something with really sharp print output (PDF generation?) for groups that like to tack paper to the wall? I’ve heard both of those requests recently from companies I work with and didn’t have any good answers for them.
I love these ajax-type calendar apps and I’d love to set one up on my own server. Unfortunately, all the mentioned alternatives don’t open up their sources, which is their good right.
Does anyone know similar projects in the open source area?
too bad netvibes doesn’t know how to deal with the rss-feed that spongecell is producing
No recurring events in SpongeCell?
Jeez. None of these calendars hold a candle to Hipcal, even with it’s sometimes slowness… Also, SpongeCell runs really slow, feels very chunky, and it’s pretty ugly. Kinda sad. Will keep looking at the others though.
I’ve been using Planzo, but the team behind it hasn’t been doing much with it. From the look of things, I expect it’ll just disappear one day.
Nice work. I am impressed!
Recurring To-Dos are available with KOrganizer. This comes with any Linux distributions that have the KDE interface or utilities.
The newest version is 3.5. To-Dos are a little buggy in 3.4 and earlier versions when dealing with recurrence.
Also, the recurrence feature set is pretty rich with KOrganizer, eg, every third thursday of the month of September, every 4th year.
I use Planzo a lot, and i’ve actually email suggestions about the site and get responses back very quickly. They definitely seem dedicated about the site
Some of you are missing the point. What the sponge is offering that is different is NLP that simplifies data entry. No one else has got this down although admittedly it doesn’t work flawlessly. What it does do is allow me to stay in touch with my call from anywhere I have cell service which is something outlook can’t do for me. It also allows RSS feeds and has a cool drag and drop that major AJAX calendars have yet to offer. I say let them continue to iron out the bugs (add recurring which they have promised as coming soon) and keep the sponge on the radar.
Microsoft appears to be getting on the iCal bandwagon in Windows Vista – http://www.micr...e/calendar.mspx
30 boxes calendar is amazing. Easily the best out there. You should also look at Hipcal…i thought that was pretty cool.
Planzo is good. It look likes a Google company, because of design. I´ve thought i´m at the login page of Gmail
Ajax Smayjax
surveyFacile.com is another good one.
I think the integration into Gmail will be a big plus, but it’ll be interesting to see if Google tries its hand at the Natural Language Processing and mobile integration that Spongecell has employed. Overall, its the ability to update and recieve through mobile NLP that sets spongecell apart from the others on the techcrunch list. either way it’s clear that calendaring has the attention of the blogosphere.
Don’t forget http://www.rememberthemilk.com
I’m looking for a good web calendar, but I don’t want to do it as a service. Ideally it would be AJAX, something I can install on a server at my company, able to accept and send exchange-compatible meeting requests, and capable of talking to an AD/LDAP server to get a list of other people to invite to meetings. The problem I’m trying to solve is half the company uses Exchange, half the company uses UNIX IMAP solutions, and outlook’s web access for calendering sucks…. Any suggestions?
Do any of these AJAX calendars sync WITH outlook? Sad to say, Im using O2k3 as my email app, and it syncs with my clie ux50 and I’ve been using y! calendar to maintain a rough “sync” btw my desktop and laptops. So what i need is a web calendar that syncs with outlook…
Airset syncs with outlook. I’m not certain about the others.
Great website! Bookmarked! I am impressed at your work!