Eelke Spaak

N.B.: version 2.0 of this gadget is now available!

I had spent some time searching for a good Windows Vista sidebar gadget that displayed a few upcoming Google Calendar events, when I noticed somewhere that, in fact, sidebar gadgets are actually just HTML/CSS/JavaScript snippets. Because I could not find any really good gadget that did what I wanted, I decided to write my own. I hereby proudly present: The Calendar v1.0 .

It will display the first six upcoming Google Calendar events, along with their start and end dates and times, displaying the latter whenever this is appropriate. Each event’s title provides a link to the appropriate Google Calendar event detail page. When you hover your mouse over the gadget, a small calendar icon will appear in the bottom right corner of the gadget. Clicking it will bring up Google Calendar in your default browser.

Before the first use, you must enter your @gmail.com address and password and a desired update interval in the gadget’s settings form.

Below are some screenshots.

The last screenshot shows two hovering functions. First, when hovering over the title of an event, its full title is shown in a tooltip. Second, when hovering anywhere over the gadget, a calendar icon is shown that links to Google Calendar. Note that Windows for some reason does not include the cursor in screenshots, so that is why there is no ‘hand’ shown in the picture.

Let me know what you think! Of course, it is free software and open source, so distribute it as you like, as long as you give me (Eelke Spaak) the credit of developing it and always provide a link to my website. Since .gadget files are actually ZIP archives, you can just extract it with WinZip or whatever to obtain the source scripts.

N.B.: version 2.0 of this gadget is now available!