Saturday, June 4, 2011

Android Calendar - Best App and Widgets with Google Sync

This is one of the best Android calendar which comes in the form of app and widgets of different sizes to suit your need. This Android calendar app allows you to access your local calendar as well as Google Android calendar from the same app. It comes with Android Google calendar sync feature and allows you to sync up your calendar content with Google calendar.

Android Business Calendar
Business Calendar : This app comes with free as well as paid version. We are going to look at it's free version now. App is feature packed and is very user friendly. On every screen of the app you can tap the help  icon at top right corner to know what all you can do with that screen. When you launch the app first time it displays help screen as shown in screenshot below.

Android Calendar Help Screen
Android Calendar Help Screen
Help screen gives all possible ways to access the help and more information of this Android calendar. Tap "Lets go" button to proceed using calendar app. Next you will see "Select Calendars" screen as shown below.

Android Calendar - Select Calendars
Android Calendar - Select Calendars
This screen displays the list of calendars to choose from. You can see your local calendar as well as Google calendars here. Mark the check box against the calendar to select it. You can tap green arrow near check box to move the calendar item from "Favorites:" to "Other Calendar:" section and vice versa. Once you complete your selection then tap "Save" button to proceed with app.

Android Calendar - Month View
Android Calendar - Month View
Above screenshot displays the month view of Android calendar. The two buttons at the bottom of the screen allows you to select or deselect available calendars quickly. If you tap one of these buttons then that particular calendar gets either selected or deselected. If selected then events of that calendar can be seen in month view above. De-selecting hides the events from that calendar. Swipe with finger the month view vertically to change the month. Small icon at top left hand corner of the screen allows you to change the view to display events as text or bar. Above screenshot shows bar mode and screenshot given below if showing text mode.

Android Calendar - Landscape Monthly View
Android Calendar - Landscape Monthly View
You can see that events are displayed as text instead of bar in above screenshot. One more thing you may have noticed that it is in landscape orientation. When you rotate Android phone then calendar view automatically change to adapt the orientation. Long press any of the date in calendar view to launch add event screen.

Android Calendar - Add New Event
Android Calendar - Add New Event
Here you can select the calendar from the list of available calendars to decide where new event would be added. Type the title of the event to identify it. Select the from date and time. At the right you can see a blue box with text "New!" inside it. This is showing the duration of the event over a time line going from top to bottom. You can tap here to quickly select duration of the event. There are more choices on this screen and you can see those by scrolling down as shown in screenshot below.

Android Calendar - Add Event More Choices
Android Calendar - Add Event More Choices
You can select check box "All Day" to quickly set the duration of the event for whole day. Set the reminder from the long list of choices like, None, On time, various durations from 5 Minutes to 4 Weeks. Here it is possible to set multiple reminders for the same event by tapping green + (plus) icon. Reminder can be deleted by tapping red X ( cross ) icon. Scroll down further to see remaining choices which are shown in screenshot below.

Android Calendar - More Add Event Choices
Android Calendar - More Add Event Choices
Privacy drop down allows you to choose from Default, Confidential, Private or Public. It allows you to choose who can see your events. Repetition drop down allows to select from One-time event, Daily, Every weekday (Mon-Fri), Weekly, Monthly and Yearly. This is very handy feature to set repetitive events.

Android Calendar - Event Info
Android Calendar - Event Info
As shown in above screenshot when you tap the event text or bar in month view it displays pop up with all the events for that day. Tap the pop up to see the list of events in separate screen. Further tap the individual event to display the event details screen shown below.

Android Calendar - Event Details
Android Calendar - Event Details
The two icons at the bottom of the Event Details screen are Edit and Delete. You can tap the left icon to edit the event and it displays the screen same as add event screen you seen earlier. The right icon can be tapped to delete the given event.

Android Calendar - Weekly View
Android Calendar - Weekly View
The above screenshot displays the multi-day or weekly view of the Android calendar app. For launching this view you move finger over multiple days in monthly view. Selecting multiple days this way launches screen shown above where you can see the events for selected days. The green bar at the bottom allows you to change the number of days displayed in the multi-day view. The current day in this view is highlighted by light cream color and small horizontal red line indicates current time.

Android Calendar - More Menu
Android Calendar - More Menu
There are many useful menus provided by this Android calendar app and clicking the more option displays above menus. One of the important menus is "Sync now" and it provides android google calendar sync feature. Tapping this menu syncs the events with Google calendar.

This app comes with very useful android calendar widgets of various sizes. You can add these widgets to the desktop of your phone. Long press desktop screen and select Android Widgets menu to see available android calendar widgets as shown in screenshot below.

Android Calendar Widgets
Android Calendar Widgets
Tap one of the Android calendar widgets you want from the list and it would display the widget configuration screen. Select the settings that you want for the widget from configuration screen and tap save button.This would display the given android calendar widget on your phone's desktop.

Android Calendar Widget
Android Calendar Widget
You can see Android calendar widget placed on desktop on the phone. Once placed on desktop you can start using widget to quickly access calendar information and perform operations which you perform using Android calendar app.

If you like this post then you may read about other exciting apps given in the popular posts displayed at the right. Keep checking back for more wonderful and best apps for Android.

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