Google Calendar Quick Add Firefox Extension

I was chatting with Lee yesterday during a meeting when he started raving about Google Calendar’s Quick Add feature. He’s not the only one, there are many who seem to be enjoying that feature as well. That’s when it occurred to me that it’s a shame that you only have it available when you are in the calendar page. However, since I hadn’t actually written a Firefox extension before, I decided to give this a try. After a few hours of constant interruption (my wife was having a scrapbooking party), I finally had something working. It took me a lot of browsing through Mozilla docs to actually get this done, but hopefully next time it’ll be much easier. It was fun to use RDF for all of the configuration files. The extension is very simple. It adds a new shortcut (CTRL + ; [semi-colon]) to your browser window that launches a simple text dialog. In the text box you can enter whatever you would in the Google Calendar Quick Add feature and if you hit ENTER it will create the event for you in your default calendar. Remember, you must be logged in for it to work, if not, I’ll remind you anyways. The icing on the cake, is that it will find any Google Calendar window that’s opened and reload it for you so you can see your new appointment. Install Quick Add. The extension is a bit of a hack, it uses AJAX to piggyback on your Google Calendar session without me having to ask your for a password. Basically, it’s just a call to /calendar/compose?ctext= to get the natural language parsing. However, I was unable to create the event in the same way as the browser does because I’m missing some cookie information (and laziness). I decided instead to use the Google Data API (Atom) to post the new entry and it worked like a charm. Next, I’d like to figure out how to use this cute service of parsing text for calendar appointment and translating it into SPARQL queries. Right now, I can pass “Do I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow at 6pm?” and it will give the text and start time. I think that should be enough for some interesting SPARQL queries. What do you think? CHANGELOG:
  • 2007-10-08
    1.6.1 Fixed browser hanging for now (Again). Now supports multiple calendars.
  • 2006-12-19
    1.6.1 Fixed browser hanging for now.
  • 2006-12-19
    1.5.9.1 Removed integration with Google Search because of reported browser hanging. I’ll fix this when I can figure out the actual cause of the problem.
  • 2006-04-27
    Fixed events of the type ‘dinner 7-9pm’ and added location support.
  • 2006-04-26
    I’ve added better support for internationalization. Thanks to this post.
  • 2006-04-25
    Wing Yung has fixed the shortcut bug. It seems the problem was we needed to take the keyset containing the shortcut and add it to the global firefox key sets.
  • 2006-04-23
    Now it also monitors Google homepage searches for terms that could become appointments. It then injects UI elements to the homepage so with a single click you can schedule it on Google Calendar.
Screenshots: A Google search turned into an appointment link to Google Calendar. Pressing CTRL+; will popup a dialog to add appointments to Google Calendar quickly.
  • co.mments
  • connotea
  • del.icio.us
  • digg
  • Ma.gnolia
  • Reddit
  • scuttle
  • Technorati
  • YahooMyWeb

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Google Calendar Quick Add Firefox Extension,” an entry on Elias Torres

Published:
04.18.06 / 11pm
Category:
Atom, SemWeb, Technology