Tasks in Google Calendar

One of the features that has been missing from Google Calendar is a tasks feature. Ajaxian has a post about a third party developer called Remember the Milk which has come up with a plugin for Google Calendar called Remember the Milk for Google Calendar:

Earlier this year we added support for showing tasks on your calendar. It’s a handy way to see your tasks alongside your calendar events, but it hasn’t been possible to add, edit, complete, and postpone your tasks from within Google Calendar. That is, until now…

Introducing Remember The Milk for Google Calendar

We know that many of you are managing your tasks with Remember The Milk and your events with Google Calendar, and we thought it would be very cool if we could bring the two together. This new feature adds a small task icon to the top of each day in Google Calendar — click on the icon to:

• Review your tasks for the day
• Add new tasks and edit existing ones
• Easily complete and postpone tasks
• Review your overdue tasks
• Optionally show tasks with no due date
• See where your tasks are located on a map

See your tasks in the real world

Thanks to the magic of Google Maps, we’ve made a mini version of the Locations feature available in Google Calendar. The map shows where your day’s tasks are located in the real world, so you can see what’s nearby or on your way, and plan the best way to get things done.

As with the gadget we created for Google Personalized Homepage, this feature is available in 18 languages and will use your language setting to automatically display in your language.

In the first place it is quite something that Google facilitates this sort of interactivity with its products and opens the door for a whole community of developers who believe that can take what Google has provided and make it even better or feature rich.

To use this feature you need to first add it to your Google Calendar. To do this go to the Remember the Milk post and click on the button:

That will take you to your Google Calendar account and, after asking your permission to do the deed, will install the tasks feature. Once installed the feature is identifiable by the blue and white ticks at the top of each day on your calendar. There is a little catch though. To make use of this service you must create an account on Remember the Milk. Remember the Milk is, after all, a company that provides a task/reminder service that is accessible not just through Google Calendar but also using your mobile phone, your desktop calendar application (like iCal) or your feedreader (when you create an account you basically create a calendar which has a feed you can subscribe to).

This service is a great idea but it is another service to subscribe to and something that just takes users further away from their core applications. Running a complete schedule now requires running your desktop application (in many instances) and/or your online scheduling application (like Google Calendar) and an additional tasks application (Remember the Milk). I don’t know about you but this is the sort of complexity that would probably persuade me to make the move to an integrated application like Scrybe once the product is out of beta testing.

On the other hand there is a degree of integration given that the Remember the Milk application does integrate into Google Calendar. I have signed up for an account and there is quite a few interesting features in Remember the Milk worth checking out. The accounts are free so if this interests you then check it out. In fact, this site is worth checking out even if you have no interest in Google Calendar and your only interest is a web-based tasks application which you can access pretty much anywhere.

Do you have any thoughts on this service? Any other services you found to be better options? Let me know by posting a comment below!

Tags: google calendar, remember the milk, tasks, reminders, scrybe, integration, organiser