Google Calendar and Mozilla Thunderbird
April 15th 2007
It seems there’s finally a way to integrate Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning (the Mozilla Calendar project) with Google Calendar in both directions, using the Provider plugin. There’s a great tutorial on it here that worked perfectly for me.
The Calendar project (Lightning) still has a ways to go before it can compete with Google Calendar in usability and user interface quality — a canonical example might be the “Add task” pane, which scared me to death when I opened it…
It’s a generic form interface of course, but man is it cluttered and complex. Adding a task is usually needs only one line of text — “File my taxes by April 16th” (a reminder for all you Americans ;-), or “Go to the store and get milk.”
Less often you add a deadline or date, and even that could be extracted from one line of text, making the interface both simple and powerful. Google does this for adding calendar events and it works marvelously.
Rarely do I complexify my tasks beyond that, so I don’t want to always be forced to look through all these options! Even clicking the “<< Less” button (you might have noticed) leaves all the fields above the description box, and the dual date fields are enough opportunity for confusion.
Obviously there’s a lot of power once an interface like this is learned, but I believe it’s possible to keep all the power of a complex interface while simplifying it following principles of good interface design. On this screen, if the title field was larger than the rest and bolded to signify it’s the most important bit of information, I would be much happier, as my eye would be led to where it needs to go most often and for the best reason. Suddenly the purpose of the interface becomes obvious, all the secondary options get a secondary appearance and thought, and it becomes much less confusing. Simple. And there are dozens more simplifications and improvements that could be made to every interface that looks like this.
I only care now because the Google Calendar link means I’ll be trying to use Thunderbird/Lightning for my main calendar now, so the interface better be on the same level or I’m going back to the web!
Any thoughts? What would you do to this screen?