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Sep 20

Best Greasemonkey Scripts: Google Calendar Timeline

Posted in: Freeware, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on November 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

I absolutely love Google Calendar because of its extensive list of features, and the ability to share calendars among family and friends is a huge plus. One feature that I always thought would be nice would be a timeline showing what the current time is. Some desktop calendars have this exact feature, but I didn’t think there was any way to get it in Google Calendar.

I was browsing through UserScripts.org looking for a good Greasemonkey script to write about, and that’s when I realized that I underestimated the programmers out there. Someone not only created a Google Calendar Timeline script, but they totally pimped it out with settings, too.

After you get the script installed you can go to the Google Calendar Settings, and then to Time Line to change the appearance and formatting. Here’s just a handful of the predefined styles to get you started:

Both the “line style” and “time style” just use CSS, so if you’re familiar with coding CSS it should be a piece of cake to customize the appearance of the line. When changing the “time format” you’ll want to use these for guidelines:

h: hour(0-23)
hh: hour(00-23)
H: hour(1-12)
HH: hour(01-12)
m: minute(0-59)
mm: minute(00-59)
s: second(0-59)
ss: second(00-59)
am: “am” or “pm”
AM: “AM” or “PM”

Even though the settings do appear to be directly integrated into your Google Calendar, they are actually stored on your computer. That means that the settings are not carried from one computer to another, and this is yet another reason I wish Google offered a custom plugin system for some of their services.

Maybe Gina from Lifehacker will add this to the Better GCal extension.