The blog has moved to syngron.com
I am a happy Google Calendar user, however I was always annoyed by two things. One of those things was the missing year view which I fixed now by programming a new Google Calendar Gadget which you can find on my Github page. It creates a year view with each month in one row and all the events from your selected calendars:
https://raw.github.com/syngron/misc/master/SyngronYearView.html
 |
| Column year view with events in red (German public holidays) |
https://www.google.com/calendar/render?gadgeturl=https://raw.github.com/syngron/misc/master/SyngronYearView.html
The other annoying thing is not being able to smoothly scroll between months in the Google Calendar. At the end of the month I am not interested in the last four weeks before but more in the coming 4 weeks but in the online view there is only the static monthly view available at the moment. That annoyance I could not fix yet.
When I searched for a year view I found out that it was available through Google Labs as a gadget. Unfortunately I was very disappointed by it. I was expecting a typical wall calendar like we have it in German offices many times. These calendars have just 12 columns where each columns is one month. Each day of the months has a little field to the right to fill in simple informations or write the important office or holiday days. The Google Labs year view on the other hand is composed of a grid with four columns and three rows and each grid cell has the information of one month with no space for information of events. The next problem was that not even the days with events were marked specially. I know already how a year calendar looks, what I do never remember is where on that calendar I have appointments!
After googling a while I did find at least a version of this year view calendar with days with events being marked in a different color. However the event marking did not work properly when I last checked (found on the webbricks blog).
In the end I did not find any solution which resembled my view of a year view. After studying both codes, the one of the original Google Labs calendar gadget and the one from webbricks I thought however that I could try to build my own Gadget with my very rusty Javascript, HTML and CSS skills and the two templates. You can see the not quite perfect result in the picture above.
The Gadget works quite good and shows each month in one columns with all the events of the selected calendars in a separate row of the day just as I wanted it. But I was still not able to fix the height of the calendar table columns to an equal size. So months with more days or more events will be longer than others. Another issue is that if the screen is too small, months are cut off at the bottom (decreasing the font size with e.g. CTRL+MINUS can fix that). Another problem that came up with my real events was, that all events from the first five months were shown, but sometimes not all of the later months. I poll the calendar API monthwise and correctly check for events which last over the time of two different months, maybe the API does not allow too many polls in a row. I also found out that one single poll for the whole year does not work. I experimented with window lengths of days and weeks for polling but they were slower than the month wise polling and resulted in the same missing events sometimes. If somebody knows why that happens please tell me.
To sum it up I can say that the Google Calendar Gadgets are a great option and they can be programmed quite easily if you know web design a bit. The only problem is the annoying debugging procedure which involves reinstalling the Gadget after each code change so that the Google cache is not loading the cached version again. The cache is caching Gadgets for one hour and for me also the option ?nocache did not help. So it is best to pre-test Gadgets on your own server before trying them with the Google Calendar API.
