Google Calendar has a ‘quick add’ feature that allows you to enter diary items in plain English – or at least plain pidgin English.
It shows when you click the red ‘create’ button. There’s an example:
Dinner with Michael 7 p.m. tomorrow
You can also type a message like:
Coffee 11am Thursday, Marvin
All good. Or good that is until this Tuesday morning May 1. I typed:
Coffee 11am Monday, Fred
Google Calendar added the item, but instead of scheduling the coffee date for next Monday, which is, like, you know, the obvious thing to do. It scheduled it for Monday April 29, that’s two days ago.
Why would a calendar’s quick add feature schedule something in the past? Does this make sense to anyone other than Google?
I remember turning up a week early for an interview: “I’m a Yorkshireman,” said the interviewee; “and when I say ‘next Monday’ I mean ‘next’. From the standpoint of when we last spoke, today is ‘this Monday’.” And you expect a machine to understand such partial expressions? 🙂
I defend the colloquial meaning of “contemporary” on the same lines as your “Monday”: if there’s no explicit reference-point, it’s contemporary with today. Like -3 = 0-3 and /3 = 1/3 (well it does in APL and I think that makes sense).
What amuses me about Googel’s diary, as I’ve previously tweeted, is its wild attempt to interpret location. “Tech Bunker” (the room where @computerworldnz holds editorial meetings I teleconference into) has got me maps of similarly named places in the US and Austria.
And I have files to which Windows 7 has attached a creation date in the future (I can’t think how) If I do a time-ordered list it lists files as “a long time ago”… “last week”… “today” and “some time in the future”, A label for files yet to be created is explicitly programmed into the OS. That’s weird, Microsoft.
Given all the smarts in Google Now and other applications, the rock stupidity of Calendar is an embarrassment surely.
Though I will say in Calendar’s favour, it was possible to attach Google Docs to events before Gmail. But that was an embarrassment at the other end..