Neowin.net

The highly anticipated Calendar app 30Boxes goes live later today; sneaky Neowin users might just be able to get in a little early using the username beta and password tester. Rest assured, the site is much better than their password protection scheme.

30Boxes applies the AJAX magic becoming more and more familiar to online 'applications'. It's quick and snappy make it a pleasure to use. As users will quickly find out, the process of adding events is simple and well designed. It 'intellegently' parses the information you enter to form a calendar entry, which means adding data is quick and painless. The design team at 83 degrees, the makers, clearly recognised the fact that for good usability, the calendar needed to be large and clear- and it is. Stretching the full page, users can enjoy a bird's eye view on their month ahead. At the moment, there are three themes (OS X / Flickr / Gmail style), but users will be are able to change the UI themselves later.

One wouldn't expect there to be much innovation in calendars- yet strangely, there is! Most of it, neat layout and AJAX aside, comes via the clever user of RSS feeds and tagging. Events can be tagged - e.g. work, sport, etc - making it easy to search what's going on. You can also highlight events tagged with a specific phrase. The RSS features make 30Boxes very expansive; you can push data out to other applications - e.g. subscribe to your Calendar in iCal - or bring data in from other applications. 30Boxes can link up with sites like Flickr, MySpace or LiveJournal. It's impressive, and seems to work rather well.

Finally, but my no means least, probably the most interesting feature to our users is the ability to share calendars with other users. By adding 'buddies', you can share information and invite people to events listed in your calendar. The team seem to have thought a lot about how the most successful applications on the web have got that way - and they've done it well. Their developer API and efforts to allow 3rd parties to skin calendars easily makes 30Boxes quite an exciting new launch.

The one problem we’ve found is this: we’re not quit sure how 30Boxes is going to make money, an important component to long term survival. We’d expect, in the long term, either some form of subscription (ala Flickr) or perhaps no ‘pay-for’ model at all- simply hold out on venture capital and wait to get bought (and we’re pretty sure they will be) by one of the big boys – be it Google / Yahoo, Microsoft or other.

30Boxes goes live later today. From limited testing in Firefox and IE7 Beta 2 preview, it seems to be reasonably bug free. However, remember that it is still in beta, and will no doubt receive rather a lot of traffic- so be patient. But enjoy!

View: 30Boxes ( username / password = beta/tester )