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June 29, 2010, 03:00 PM ET
Simplify Your Scheduling: Doodle and Tungle Announce New Features
It's been awhile since I've written anything about online scheduling apps, and that's mostly because I think we've already covered the leading services in this category. (See our posts on Doodle, Tungle, Jiffle, and Acuity.)
No service quite fulfills my criteria for "The Ideal Academic App," but Tungle and Doodle come pretty close. And now, these two services have developed a few new features that get them even closer.
Doodle has announced "a calendar view that enables users to directly start and answer meeting requests with all relevant information up to date at one place." This means that you don't have to toggle between looking at Doodle and looking at your calendear when you are requesting (or responding to requests for) an appointment. I like Doodle, and I'm glad to see them add this feature.
Tungle, however, is blowing Doodle (and other competitors) out of the water. They recently announced several nice new features (including a few that were mentioned in this ProfHacker comments thread). Additionally, if you have a web site that runs on WordPress or Typepad, you can now make use of a plugin to embed Tungle in one of your pages.
As I prepare for the upcoming academic year, I'm going to be spending time with Tungle, deciding how best to integrate it into my calendar workflow.
How about you? What kind of tools do you use when scheduling meetings with friends, colleagues, or students? Let us know in the comments.
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Comments
1. brianborchers - June 29, 2010 at 04:10 pm
I'm a pretty heavy Google Calendar user. My wife and our department secretary have full access to see what I'm doing and the power to put stuff on my calendar, while others see lots of public scehduled events (e.g. "MATH 415 from 1:00 to 2:00" and other "busy" blocks of time that I haven't made public. Most of the folks that I work with on research projects also use Google Calendar, so I've got access to their calendars.
I'd be interested in using a meeting scheduling system like Tungle or Doodle if it would play well with Google Calendar. I see that Doodle now claims to do so, but I don't see reference to it in the description of Tungle.
2. george_h_williams - June 29, 2010 at 05:31 pm
@brian: I find my Google Calendar account indispensable, and Tungle does, in fact, play well with gCal. Check out the "Synchronization & Compatibility" section of my original Tungle post.
3. ndkaneb - June 30, 2010 at 07:50 am
For those of us involved in international collaboration, the ability to seamlessly convert schedules into multiple timezones is crucial. http://whenisgood.net/ does this well without requiring complicated access.
4. koufax33 - June 30, 2010 at 09:17 am
Thank you for this useful column! After finishing my PhD, my campus email had to be forwarded somewhere if I wanted to continue to receive my e-mails so I chose Gmail. I was so used to my on-line Outlook so it's taking some adjustment for the gCalendar. Anyway, I digress but I enjoy these columns and the commentary others add.
5. lexalexander - June 30, 2010 at 10:42 am
Another satisfied user of Google Calendar here. My department uses it for work scheduling, I use it for both work and personal scheduling, and my Android phone plays nicely with both.
6. jbncalif - June 30, 2010 at 03:17 pm
I've been using TimeBridge with great satisfaction, having booked several dozen meetings thus far with it. I compared it to Tungle about a year ago and decided to stick with TimeBridge. However, I do think it's worth looking at Tungle again. My chief complaint about TimeBridge is being able to suggest no more that 5 meeting times at once, which in academia is not usually workable when planning out, say, a semester calendar for a committee. However, TimeBridge's calendar integration, reminder system, and Evernote integration are all nice features. I couldn't stand Doodle because of the missing calendar integration, so I'm very glad to hear of this enhancement.
7. hmwhitney - June 30, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Thanks for this update, George!
@jbncalif, my situation sounds like yours. I've been a pretty dedicated TimeBridge user for scheduling meetings with colleagues (although the integration with Evernote is news to me!), and last year I used Jiffle for scheduling meetings with students. However, it looks like Tungle has just thrown the trump card with the new features and I'll be moving to that.
8. george_h_williams - July 01, 2010 at 08:12 pm
Thanks for weighing in, everyone! TimeBridge has come up a few times when I've published one of these posts about scheduling, so it sounds like I really need to check it out.
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