Google Calendar is a little too smart and a little too stupid all at the same time. Today I decided, last-minute, to attend tonight’s Mobile Monday, so I create an appointment, calling it ‘Mobile Monday’. It vanishes. Weird. I try it again – it vanishes again. Log out, log back in, try it again. Vanishes. I’m stumped. I go look at next week’s calendar because I’m also setting aside some time to see a show. Three identical appointments, all for next Monday, all simply called ‘Mobile’. Ah ha. Did a little experimenting, found that an appointment for “Mobile Thursday” spontaneously created a “Mobile” appointment next Thursday, and then recreated the original appointment, this time for the one-word “MobileMonday”.
Moral of the story: if you’re going to try to do smart things spontaneously for your user, you should also be smart enough to detect when things are going wrong. (You can see this principle at work in the iPhone’s spelling autocorrection feature – if you correct an autocorrection once or twice, that autocorrection will stop.) While gCal was smart to move my original appointment, when I immediately tried to recreate the very same appointment in the very same spot, it should’ve caught on to its error and corrected itself.
