TechCrunch has details and screenshots of Google’s upcoming calendaring application, codenamed CL2. Aside from the typical Web 2.0 goodies, such as AJAX UI, feeds, integration with Gmail, and notifications, there’s a feature called Quick Add.
Quick Add gives you a text box where you can type all the information about your event in normal English, and we’ll fill out the form for you. We’re pretty excited about this feature, so please let us know how it works for you.
Quick Add? I wrote a similarly-named product for the Palm OS years ago! My QuickAdd was a web clipping application that allows you to add new memos, addresses, dates, and to-do items from a single application. It tied in with another product of mine, iKnapsack, a tool to get web content such as calendar entries directly into the Palm’s native applications.
Google’s Quick Add bears a strong resemblance to the Newton’s Intelligent Assist. Assist enabled the Newton to interpret whatever I wrote to perform various actions such as add new appointments to my calendar, remember a to-do item, fax or email a document, or print a note. Third-party developers could also add new vocabulary items to extend the functionality of Assist. I demoed this to Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk at the Mashup Camp last month. He wrote,
As an aside, Adam took the time to demo some of the Newton functionality for me yesterday – yes, that Newton – and it’s amazing how ahead of its time that device was. Linking the calendar with notetaking with contacts? I can’t do that on my desktop.
Looks like Intelligent Assist is coming back in vogue!
tow.com 
I’ve been looking for this utility for some time, and noticed a link from this excellent blog: http://swissmiss.typepad.com/
The utility:
Import your Mac OS X Address Book into GMail
http://orion.csuchico.edu/~bborofka/atog/index.html
Congrats on the house Adam! We’re not quite (not by a long shot, actually) settled in here in Connecticut…we sure miss CA. :(
Yeah, CL2 uses it as does 30Boxes. Personally, I find it neither impressive nor particularly useful. And it should never be terribly useful, because if it is, that just means the GUI was designed poorly.
I’ve now published an ‘alpha’ copy of a “Quick Add” tool that works directly with iCalendar fields, including the possibly to “Quick Add” events from a cell phone. The code will appear soon on CPAN as Cal::QuickAdd. Here are’s a link the copy of the docs until then:
http://mark.stosberg.com/Tech/iqa.html