Quite often, it's the little things that make quite a difference.

As most of you know by now, Google Calendar (Beta!) was launched last week after months of speculation, leaked screenshots and so on. Now if you've tried 30 Boxes, which I mentioned a couple of months ago, you'll notice quite a number of similarities, including the "quick add" feature that uses natural language parsing. Yes, Google Calendar has a notably cleaner look-and-feel, but there's one feature that really caught by attention, and that has to do with Gmail integration. Check this out.

I sent an email to myself, with the line: "ACM General Body meeting this Thursday at 6:00PM in Boelter 4760." Gmail parsed the message, automatically discovered that the email body contained a reference to an event, and offered to add it to my Google Calendar. As you can see, it's not perfect yet and it misses some things at this point, but it's still very neat.

Outlook 2003 has some top-notch calendaring and scheduling capabilities, but this is one feature I'd love to have!