Google Calendar Gets a Redesign and Dark Mode 31
Google is introducing a dark mode to the web version of Google Calendar and rolling out a "refreshed user interface." From a report: The new UI will include buttons, dialog boxes, and sidebars that are "more modern and accessible" with improved typefaces. The update started rolling out this week and soon it will be available to everyone, whether they're using a personal Gmail login or any sort of paid Google Workspace account.
[...] Google says the updated calendar UI will also feature "iconography that is legible and crisp, with a fresh feel," using its "custom-designed and highly-legible typefaces" that bring it line with Google's Material Design 3 standards. The updates, including dark mode, will also apply to "the entire calendar web experience," including the task list view.
[...] Google says the updated calendar UI will also feature "iconography that is legible and crisp, with a fresh feel," using its "custom-designed and highly-legible typefaces" that bring it line with Google's Material Design 3 standards. The updates, including dark mode, will also apply to "the entire calendar web experience," including the task list view.
Endless scrolling finally? (Score:1)
That google calender where you cannot scroll week by week in a e.g. 4 or 6 week view is just unusable ..
Re: Endless scrolling finally? (Score:2)
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Doomscrolling the calendar. Nope, nothing planned... Nope, nothing... Nope...
"more modern and accessible" (Score:3)
Love how "more modern and accessible" in a news article about a software or technology product usually seems to mean
- The marketing team couldn't come up with any important new features to justify their jobs
- The "more modern and accessible" really means changed looks, possibly 0.0001% better and sure to make life harder for the millions of people just using a utility tool for basic features
- Visually impaired people were discarded, and not considered as equal users to the rest of the userbase, so lowering
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On your second point: More whitespace. More whitespace (wasted screen real estate) is always "more modern and accessible." Not sure where that concept came from, but folks straight out of design or marketing courses *LOVE* it.
Every version is worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Every version is worse than the last one.
It used to be clean and fast and functional, now it's a bloated bag of monkey snot.
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A few years ago I switched over to just running my own calDAV/cardDAV (calendar & tasks / contacts) server on a raspberry pi--works a dream.
Currently using Baikal [sabre.io], pretty easy to setup.
You could probably even run a calDAV server on your phone and something like mDNS or dynDNS for anywhere else you need to sync your calendar. I haven't tried this as the pi + a domain name pointed at it works for me.
Re:Every version is worse (Score:4, Informative)
I had a look just now and it seems fine. Clean, dark mode is nice, all the functions I want are easily accessible.
What specific issue do you have with it? I do run uBlock so maybe there's something I'm not seeing.
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On Android etar is a nice replacement. It uses the same Android calendar provider backend, so you can keep using the calendar in your account, but still have a useful interface. On the PC you can just use the Google calendar with thunderbird.
Dark Mode (Score:4, Funny)
It only lets you schedule things like colonoscopies, root canals, DMV appointments, IRS audits, all-day zoom meetings, and family holidays ...
HUGE News! (Score:1)
This is normally news this HUGE is only reported by Apple.
Re: No Thanks (Score:2)
Imagine being so mad at other people having a good time here and there in the year.
If it bothers you, you can always make your own holiday calendar. It only takes about 10 minute to fill out an entire year!
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Maybe one day we'll get back to the 90s (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when you could just arbitrarily change your colors? I seem to recall that if you did it in Windows (or perhaps some other popular Windows software) there would be a warning if you attempted to choose a setting with insufficient contrast.
How did we get from there to companies announcing a 2nd color scheme as if it were some kind of achievement?
Also, POKE 53280,0 and maybe POKE 53281,0. One or the other was border and screen color on a C-64, and 0 was black. So literally, what we could do with a couple BASIC commands in the 80s is some great new feature?
For these reasons, the phrase "dark mode" is rather triggering for me.
Re: Maybe one day we'll get back to the 90s (Score:2)
Techjically you still can change the theme of your window manager. And even of your webbrowser. But most app don't respect it much. It is easy enough to do that there were always addons to do just that.
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All of your comments are right on the mark, and I suspect zillions of people share your sentiments. I used to love that I could configure Windows to look a way that worked for me and made me feel comfortable for long screen sessions. Up through XP, Windows was generally very user oriented. Then it all changed into what you describe, with blatant disregard for making happy users.
I don't work for any of those companies, so I have no insider knowledge. But, my impressions after watching all of this for th
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Up through XP, Windows was generally very user oriented. Then it all changed into what you describe, with blatant disregard for making happy users.
Someone who worked on Windows at that time told me this:
Up until XP, they had direct feedback from users, in the sense that if users liked what they built, they would buy it.
After XP it was very unclear to the people building Windows whether any of their changes were something users liked or not. They tried to add things like analytics, but power users turned those off, meaning their votes didn't count.
The customizability of Windows was great, but it was still less than Linux.
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Gmail does offer a lot of colour schemes so it's odd but not surprising that Calendar doesn't too. You can theme it by injecting your own CSS with a browser extension.
Maybe it's a good thing. If they had enough resources to add custom colour schemes they might be tempted to tinker with other parts of the UI, and that rarely goes well.
Question (Score:2)
So more whitespace, less functionality (Score:3)
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No.
It's called "All our users use phones like we do. What's a laptop?"
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Try setting the layout to "compact" if you don't like the spacing. It's pretty crammed if you do.
Don't forget manifest v3 (Score:3, Informative)
I don't care how pretty it looks, Google is a terrible company that's pissing on users for its own gain.
Improvements to "embedded" finally (Score:2)
The "embedded mode", where you could put your calendar into your own web page or portal, also got a Material Design (3) improvement after languishing in Google's older style long past Material 2's release.
Granted, if your own page isn't Material, well...
When was the last time... (Score:1)
Trying to think of the last time one of these "redesigns" from Google actually made things better. I'm drawing a blank.
I won this thread (Score:2)
https://arstechnica.com/apple/2024/10/apple-teases-week-of-announcements-about-the-mac-starting-on-monday/