Google Calendar Labs Gets Three More Interesting Tools

Google's Labs experiments have proven quite successful and quite a hotbed for innovation. With the Labs feature, Google developers feel more at ease experimenting with wild features and tools knowing they won't ruin anyone's experience by doing so. The company has been adding the Labs section to all of its main products, most recently to Google Maps, and launched Google Calendar Labs last summer. Now it's adding three new experiments to it, which should make your day-to-day planning a little easier and hopefully more fun.

"Event flair by Dave Marmaros - Want a little airplane icon next to information about your upcoming flight? Or stars next to meetings with your boss? This experiment lets you choose from forty different icons and add one to each Calendar event," Grace Kwak, product manager at Google, writes in the official announcement.

This experiment is on the cutesy side, it enables you to add small icons next to planned events to better differentiate themselves. The icons have a very old-school look to them and, interestingly, they'll also be visible to others invited to a particular event.

"Gentle reminders by Sorin Mocanu - Turn on 'Gentle Reminders,' and when you get a notification, the title of your Calendar window or tab will start blinking and the event details will stay in Calendar." The title does a good way of explaining what this experiment is all about. Instead of the effective but quite annoying browser pop-up notifications, if you're using Chrome on Windows or Linux, you can also enable the desktop notifications feature.

"Automatically declining events by Lucia Fedorova and Miguel García - Have you ever checked your calendar and noticed that someone scheduled a really important meeting during your vacation or at a time when you're not available? Now there's a way to automatically decline events when you're not around." This feature is rather obvious and it could probably be integrated in the main tool at some point. It simply declines invitations to events during periods of times when it knows you will be unavailable.