After delivering sync with Google Calendar a couple weeks ago, what other love can we give for Google?

How about this? Would you like to be able to use Presdo without signing up for it first? We’ve heard from many of you who say that with so many web services today, you have to sign up before you can use them. It takes time, we know, in this fast ‘tweeting world.

To save you the time so you can get to the good stuff in Presdo, we’ve added the ability to sign in with Google. (In technical jargon, we added support for OpenID.) Now, you won’t need to sign up first to use Presdo.

On Presdo’s sign in box or sign up page, just opt to sign in with Google instead. Presdo will redirect you to a Google page where you give Presdo permission to use your sign in. Seconds later, you’ll be brought back to Presdo as a full-fledged user ready to go.

Best of all, it works with both regular Google and Google Apps accounts. That was easy.

Today, we are very excited to announce a major new enhancement to Presdo—syncing between Presdo and Google Calendar.  We are very delighted to share the news with you!

Up until now, Presdo has been a great tool for people who organize all of their events within the app.  But let’s face it, a lot of people already use calendars, and until now, there was no good way to get people’s schedules into Presdo.  Presdo was sometimes considered an unreachable island of functionality, however great it might have been once you got here!

Some users suggested that we create a one-time calendar importer function to manage the gap, but given the dynamically changing nature of people’s calendars, we knew that wasn’t good enough.  The Presdo team has invested considerable effort to create a syncing capability that we would be proud of, and we’d like to take you on a brief tour of it.

Works with Your Availability

What does syncing with Google Calendar give you?  Briefly, you can now use Presdo to schedule events with your availability in mind.  When you schedule a Presdo event in your desired time window, Presdo offers multiple times from this time window to your guests to gather responses.  With sync, there’s a new and valuable twist.

Let’s say you’re traveling and will be in town to meet with someone on Thursday, and you’re trying to set up some meetings for Thursday.

Before syncing, the times that would be suggested for Thursday were only scheduled around other events you already had on Presdo.  Without information about your availability, Presdo suggests times spread throughout Thursday to your guests:

With Google Calendar sync, Presdo now has access to your calendar and events and knows not to suggest times during which you are unavailable.  Let’s say you have already booked meetings between 9-10:30am and 1:30 to 3:30 Thursday.  On your new event, Presdo now suggests only times that are still available to guests:

See how the times suggested to guests take note of your availability?  Cool, huh?

One View Inside Your Google Calendar

What we’ve described so far is only one half of the new sync feature.

The syncing capability continuously updates any changes in both directions.  When you confirm a specific time for an event on Presdo, your event is automatically placed on your Google Calendar:

The events that you schedule using Presdo are placed onto a separate and personalized calendar that you are automatically subscribed to called “Presdo Events”.  This way, you can clearly distinguish between the events coming from Presdo versus your own Google Calendar events.

And as you might expect, if you reschedule the times for Presdo events, they get automatically updated in Google Calendar.  Many of you have asked for the ability to automatically save events and change them on your calendar, and we’re very happy to finally deliver this capability to you.

Other Cool Things

• Events before and after – since Presdo now has access to your Google Calendar, it does some cool things to make the overall scheduling experience better.Whenever you see specific times being proposed inside Presdo, you will see a simple pop-up that shows your agenda for that day.

  

  The day agenda shows your events before and after the time in question so you have better context to decide whether it’s a good time that’s being proposal.

• Works with multiple Google Calendars – Since any Google account can subscribe to more than one Google Calendar at a time, such as a work and family calendar, you can also sync Presdo with any selection of the calendars you have access to, so you can control the availability that Presdo sees for you.When you set up syncing, just choose which calendars you want to sync:

  

   

• Works with Google Apps – finally, our syncing feature works for both normal Google accounts as well as with calendars inside Google Apps accounts, so it’s great for professional users using Google Apps.

With sync with Google Calendar, we believe Presdo will benefit a whole new audience of users already using Google Calendar to keep track of their schedules.  You now have an easy-to-use, collaborative tool that works with your Google Calendar to find the best time for group events.

So give it a spin, and get started here!  More information about our sync feature can be found in our help.

We look forward to your feedback on the new feature!

Thanks to the diligent feedback from users, we’ve made several great enhancements to Presdo’s automatic reminder feature:

• Presdo now notifies you and your guests on the day event(s) happens. Presdo used to send notifications the day before, but we’ve made this behavior more familiar so that no one forgets about the event on the day of the event.

• Presdo used to notify you on events that need your action, whether responding to an event you were invited to or confirming a final time. Whenever there’s an event in this category, we now bring this category of events forward so that it is the very first part of the notification. This way, you won’t be missing invites requiring your attention.

• Whenever Presdo sends you a notification caused by the above reasons, Presdo also tells you about events that might be coming up in the next few days—if there are any. Normally, Presdo won’t bother you with these events until the day of, but sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded a couple times of such upcoming events several days in advance just in case.

We’re very happy with these improvements. They are built on top of an existing slick reminder feature that combines all the day’s events into one message, delivered to you before the start of the day when they happen.

So, don’t worry about forgetting, since Presdo reminders will be here to help!

If you are user of Google Chrome and interested to use Presdo, you would have discovered that Presdo hasn’t worked so well with this browser.  Good news: Google just released a new version of their browser which is now compatible with Presdo.

To use Presdo with Google Chrome, make sure you have the latest version of Chrome, which is at least 2.0.172.39.  To find out how to update Chrome, check here.

Thanks to our users who recently pointed this out to us.

Of course, we continue to support Presdo on the latest versions of IE, Firefox and Safari.

When events are scheduled a couple weeks away, it’s easy to forget the exact dates and times of far-away events.  One of the most popular requests users have for us is a reminders feature in Presdo.  And that’s what we have just added.

In keeping with our approach of simplicity, there is actually nothing to configure to use the new reminders feature.  All events are instantly enabled for reminders.  Here’s how it works.

The day before any event you have scheduled, Presdo sends you an email reminding you of the upcoming event.  If you have multiple events on that day, these events are grouped into the same notification message so you see your upcoming events at a glance.

Need to reschedule an event because something suddenly came up?  The reminder provides an easy way to get to the events by providing links to each event so you can reschedule them easily.

Worried that your guests need a reminder for your event too?  No problem.  Presdo automatically sends your guests reminders for the same event too.  Maybe one of your guests hasn’t responded to your invite yet.  Presdo still sends them a reminder, and tells them that a reply is still needed.

We put a lot of thought into the reminders feature to make it just right.  Hopefully it will come in handy when the time is just right!

Every day, more and more users are scheduling more kinds of events with Presdo.  In response to requests from our users, we have increased the allowable guests per event to 100 so people have freedom to invite more people to their events!  We hope this makes Presdo an even more useful tool for everyone.  Enjoy!

Continuing our mission to constantly improving Presdo in big and small ways, we’ve added a small feature to the email messages sent by Presdo that will make a big difference.  With this feature, it’s now even easier to keep track of Presdo events in your calendar.

When you get invited to events or are notified about changes to events, Presdo automatically attaches an iCalendar event to the email that can be saved directly into your calendar.  Of course, the time of the event has to be set.  This iCalendar event not only includes the date and time, but also other details such as the location and who’s coming.

Some email programs even do cool things when they find attached iCalendar events.  If you’re a Gmail user, Gmail will automatically show you events from your Google Calendar before and after the Presdo event… right inside your email!

We hope you enjoy this little feature, which makes Presdo even better to use.

Be sure to join us at the GTD Summit in San Francisco, which starts today through Friday.  The GTD Summit brings together many people to focus on this period of immense change and new opportunities in our lives, highlighting new approaches around GTD being applied to accelerate productivity in our lives and work.

Presdo CEO Eric Ly will be participating on the following panels to discuss the future of GTD:

• A GTD Workforce – Is There a New Industry Standard – Thursday, 1:30 to 3pm
• The Virtual Workplace – Does it Work? – Thursday, 3:30 to 5pm
• Productivity Tech: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Friday, 12:45 to 2:15pm

Since tools are our specialty, we look forward to the great insights about how technology can be made to help us all achieve the ideals of GTD.

We invite you to join these sessions and add to the lively debates.  See you there!

Mies van der Rohe the architect is famously quoted as saying “less is more”.  While this saying has become fashion in Silicon Valley, in reality it’s hard to do.  As product designers at Presdo working to make our product better, we constantly strive to make things more powerful and simpler at the same time.  It is a sure sign of goodness when we can achieve the same things for users while removing something, since it makes our product easier to understand.

We made such changes recently by removing the time scroller part of our UI, a.k.a. the UI for picking a “best time” while creating events.

We’re here today to discuss this and other design changes and fill you in on Presdo’s design process.  These changes are subtle but important changes and we want our users to know about them and more importantly, why we did them.

Many users will know that you were able to pick a best time within a time window or choice of times when you create an event:

Even though it was a useful feature at times, we decided to eliminate the ability to pick a best time when setting the time for an event.

What this means now is that, like before, when you give a time window or a choice of times for an event, Presdo will make specific time suggestions to your guests within your time preference and collect their input about best times.

Why We Did It

First, we felt that there are more situations where it was actually more useful if the organizer did not pick the best time.

We’d like to illustrate this with an example.  Let’s say Henry is a small business owner who wants to use Presdo to schedule consultations with different clients at his office.  Henry does not care when clients come in, as long as they come in during on Thursday or Friday afternoon when he has set aside time for such visits.  It makes sense for Henry to give clients the first opportunity to pick a time within the time window he desires.

With the recent change to the way Presdo works, it’s now possible to achieve this; Henry enters a time window, “thu or fri afternoon”, for every meeting he wants to schedule and sends them off to his clients.  Each party picks the most convenient time for themselves.

Here’s what Henry’s guests will see when they reply:

As time slots for Thursday and Friday afternoon are filled, new clients will have only still-available time slots suggested to them during Thursday and Friday afternoon.  By removing the time scroller UI, we actually make Presdo’s behavior more useful for Henry.

Have we lost anything?  Not too much.  Some users already told us they would still like to pick a “best time”.  In fact, we believe that it’s not so much that they want to pick a best time as there are times that are not as good for them.  To get around this, you can still guide Presdo by being more specific about the times.  For example, you can enter individual time choices like “thu 2:30 or 4″ or time windows like “thu after 2:30 or friday afternoon” into Presdo.

New Time Entry Feedback

While we were at it, we also enhanced a feature that users told us they loved, which is a confirmation below the time text field showing what Presdo recognizes as you type it in:

New Guest Reply UI

We also simplified the user experience for guests by removing the “Suggest Another Time” button when they reply.  The “Yes” and “No” buttons are still there as before.  Of course, it’s still possible for guests to suggest another time, but now it’s part of deciding “yes” to the event instead of a totally separate action:

We believe this change will make it even easier for invitees to understand and interact Presdo.

By taking away some parts of the UI, we’ve actually made Presdo more flexible and powerful.

What do you think of these “less is more” changes?  Let us know!

Have you ever needed to coordinate a conference call, online chat, or Skype session with people in multiple time zones?  It’s a pain to calculate all the local times for everybody, especially with all that stuff related to daylight savings time.  And forget about it if someone wants to change the time!

It’s now so easy to deal with this situation with Presdo.

In the time editor, there’s a new checkbox called “Show local times to guests”.  Take a look:

Turn it on, and it shows you and your guests the local times happening for all guests for the event.

Let’s say you are on the west coast of the US, your friend Harry is in Paris, and Sally is in Hong Kong.  You want to schedule a conference call with them next Tuesday.  Here’s what enabling the checkbox would make the time of the event look like for you:

(6am is early, we know!)  And here’s what it would look like to Harry:

You get the idea!  Presdo shows the local times for you and everyone else involved in this event so you don’t have to do the math, and no one can complain they missed it by one hour!

Local times for guests can only be shown after they have been onto Presdo.  (You’ll see a message if some guests are new.)

So, do your part and invite them to that important meeting of yours using Presdo!