Google introduces calendar app for iPhone

Are you fed up with having to waste time integrating your Google Calendar entries with your iPhone to enjoy the benefits of access to your schedule on the go? Your life could be about to get a little easier, thanks to Google's long-awaited release of its calendar app for the iPhone.

Enjoy synchronizing your days with all the features you love about Google Calendar, without ever having to leave your Apple comfort zone.

Like its Android sibling, Google Calendar for iPhone takes a colorful approach to displaying your engagements in a daily or three-day view; much like the web version, events from different calendars are categorized by color for quick and easy identification. As well as your existing Google calendars, the app imports and works with any calendars you already have set up using your phone's own tools.

You can also take a step back and look at the whole month at a glance -- though you don't see individual appointments in this view, it allows you to select a specific date from the calendar and zoom back in to check what you have going on.

Continuing the aesthetic theme, the app takes your diary entries and prettifies them -- think a background image of palm trees if you enter the details of your upcoming holiday to the Bahamas. You'll also get useful supporting data for your day-to-day events, like maps to get you to your next meeting or an idea of the weather when you jet into a new city for the night.

If you're a Gmail user, you can have the app automatically create events from your email -- perfect for having details of meetings and travel bookings plugged into your schedule for easy reference. Features like this bring you the benefits of travel planning apps like Tripit without the hassle of having to forward each email confirmation first.

Adding diary engagements manually is a breeze, too. This functions in much the same way as the web-based Google Calendar, except that you can tap into your iPhone's contact list to select those you want to invite to your events. The app can also go some way to predicting where you'll host each event, and so autofill the location for you.

While many of the features of the app are not dissimilar to things you can already accomplish using Google Calendar on the web, the app's release means all of those tools are finally bundled up and easily accessible to those of us who just can't stray too far from our iPhone. A switch to the new Google Calendar for iPhone app means a big step up in performance and productivity if you're currently using the far more basic features of your phone's in-built calendar app.

David Spire, president and CEO of United Systems, holds multiple professional certifications. He can be reached at 941-721-6423 or by email at david.spire@uscomputergroup.com.

This story was originally published April 8, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Google introduces calendar app for iPhone."