14 DAY TRIAL // Gmail Labs has proven very successful for Google and the constant introduction of features and tweaks has made it easy to see which might prove useful and which aren't so popular. But even if a feature never gets promoted from Labs to the regular product, as it may not get too much traction, it could still be very useful for some people. And the popularity of Gmail Labs has inspired Google to create a Labs section for Calendar too.
“We try to balance usefulness and impact, but often that's not enough. A feature may be useful to only a small handful of people, but to those folks it might be incredibly important. This is especially the case with some of our enterprise customers who are looking for ways to extend Calendar in highly specialized ways that would apply only to their employees.” David Marmaros, Google software engineer wrote.
“We've been looking for a way to release early features to users in a quick and experimental fashion, but in a way that would let developers and customers outside of Google extend Calendar too. We've seen how successful Gmail Labs has been and decided Calendar deserved Labs too.”
The newly launched section comes with six features that might prove useful, like the possibility to set your status to “Free or Busy” or to “Attach a Document” to an event. A “World Clock” was introduced to see the time if the meeting is in another time zone as well as a timer showing how much time you have until your “Next Meeting.” Finally, a new way of navigating was launched, allowing users to “Jump to Date” directly.
With Google Calendar Labs also comes a new set of APIs to allow developers to modify the interface itself. While Calendar already had a solid set of APIs to access the data, like iCalendar, CalDAV, or the Calendar Data API, now it can be treated like a gadget container. Just like the gadgets in iGoogle, this will allow developers to create any number of useful features that may otherwise not be integrated in the regular version.