view my budget on google calendar

[Anonymous]

#3387

is this possible?

[Eric Poulin]

#3798

I’ve looked into making a iCal feed for CalendarBudget which could feed into Google Calendar – however, there are a few things that don’t make much sense.

1) Your daily balance won’t appear anywhere. iCal feed are just individual calendar items, they don’t have any control over the display of the items.
2) Traditional Calendar tools, like Google Calendar expect things like a time, location, etc.. With CalendarBudget data, we’d somehow need to merge the entry title with the amount so you can see it… but then you can’t do any math with it… not sure how useful it would actually be.

What would you want to see in Google Calendar from CalendarBudget?

[Anonymous]

#3799

I guess what would be better then is to allow us to put daily appointment entries onto the calendarbudget calendar instead…I’m wanting to see all the options that calendarbudget shows along with my appointments for the day. I’m trying to avoid having to go to several different sites to keep track of things if one site will do it all – wishful thinking maybe?  :)

[Eric Poulin]

#3800

I’ve been trying to avoid CalendarBudget being a regular calendar since that whole calendar space can be very complicated and Google already has a great solution.
Having said that, I understand the want to have it all in one place. I’ll keep this thread open for discussion.  If we have any bright ideas on how to do it better, I’d like to do it, but I think we don’t have a good solution yet.

[rinahatcher]

#3801

I just posted a couple of ideas in a thread about an iphone app, but it would be relevant to this discussion.

I’m not familiar with the Google Calendar api or anything like that. But, I’m wondering if they have any way of just pulling in a read-only view of the items in Calendar Budget, much the same way you can pull in the holidays into a Google Calendar, or the weather and moon phases into the Google Calendar.

An idea I mentioned in my other post is a text message based entry solution, or a simple form based solution. I believe in Google Calendars you can create links in a custom sidebar, so if Calendar Budget read-only could be pulled in, maybe a link could be set in the sidebar linking you to a simple transaction form.

Overall, a user would still want to log into the Calendar Budget interface at key points in their budget planning, but daily transactions could be posted via the mobile text or form ideas. Then, just preview (read-only, not edit) your Calendar Budget info in other interfaces (whatever you could develop it to work with – maybe RSS?).

Thanks for being open to ideas! Love the Calendar Budget :)

[Eric Poulin]

#3802

Thanks for your input.
Since CalendarBudget is calendar-based, I think iCal format is probably the best way to go for a read-only format.. but I also think more investigation on how this would really be used is needed.
Having CalendarBudget data show up in, say, Google Calendar, would look really awkward. But – maybe we’ll just have the daily balance available in the iCal feed, then when you click the balance for details, your daily entries are listed in the details… still not sure how we want to proceed on this front.

At any rate, I think a mobile app will take precedence and perhaps help resolve some of these issues.

[Obelix]

#3803

What about allowing you to set up an “alert” as part of an entry that could be passed to GCalendar?  That alert could include a link back to CalBudget and a description.  It wouldn’t be intended to display the current balance, but rather serve as a reminder that certain bills/income are due soon.  It would bring people back here regularly to deal with the events regularly.  it would be really cool to be able to log in directly(no email/passwd, just straight to the calbudget page) from the event link, but I’m not sure if that can be secured well.  maybe just password?  And this should be a paid version only option.

*edit:add paid version only*

[Eric Poulin]

#3804

Hey – I like that suggestion.
I’ve been thinking about this idea more over the past few days… I think any entry in an iCal/xml feed should link back to CalendarBudget – I can create (in the return to CalendarBudget link) an encrypted way to log you in directly… just need to mull over the security of it.

I’ve also been thinking I could create daily entries @ say 11:59pm on the day and make the daily account balance an all-day event so it appears at the top of the list. Each account would be a different feed, thus you could differentiate by color highlight (in Google Calendar).

[Anonymous]

#3805

anymore thought to this feature?

[Eric Poulin]

#3806

I still think this is a great idea and thanks for bringing it up again.
I’m planning some new feature work over the next 3-4 weeks. I’d like to get this in then.

[Eric Poulin]

#3807

Decided to do this after a few more people suggested it through email.
Going to make the account balance show as an all-day event.
Individual transactions will show up as calendar entries starting at 12:00 midnight and occuring every 30 minutes until you run out of entries for that day.
This seems to be the best way to make it work. I’ll release it shortly and if there are any thoughts on improvement, adjustments should be fairly easy.

[Eric Poulin]

#3808

This is done!
Login to the calendar and to go Setup -> Account Setup, then click the iCal feed button to get your private link for that account. There are instructions for how to import the feed into Google calendar and iPhone calendar. Other systems will be similar.
Thanks for this great suggestion folks – it works great!

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