A new day has dawned in the world of iOS calendar apps. This isSunrise, a calendar offering from a team of former Foursquaredesigners (Pierre Valade and Jeremy Le Van) thatdraws in data from your existing accounts on Google Calendar,Facebook and LinkedIn, and packages it up in a pleasingly simpleinterface.
The aim of Sunrise’s design is breathe new life into the “stale” nature of the majority ofexisting calendar interfaces; while many of us might add a host ofinformation to services such as Facebook and Google Calendar,former Foursquare UX designer Pierre Valade told TechCrunch that he didn’t feel that enough of theinformation we pump into those services made it back to users in auseful form.
Sunrise started life as an email service, which dropped adaily update into your inbox of all your planned meetings andevents for that day, grabbing the information from Google Calendar,Facebook, LinkedIn and Eventbrite. The new app builds on thismodel, collecting together events and appointments that can goamiss across a spread of different services.
Opening Sunrise does require you to give it access to yourFacebook account — an instant turn off for any users looking todistance themselves from Zuckerberg’s all-knowing social site.While Apple’s own calendar can link up with your existing Facebookaccount, the Sunrise interface demonstrates the limited nature ofthat relationship; while the Apple calendar presents the basicinformation about an event (event title, time, place), Sunrisedraws in profile pictures and account information from eventcreators and invitees, allows you to respond to the event, view thelocation on a Google map, write on the event’s wall — essentiallyallowing you to control the calendar aspect of Facebook withouthaving to leave Sunrise. Any information that you’ve stored onGoogle Calendars, LinkedIn and Facebook is thus convenientlyaggregated into a single calendar, ending the need to skip betweenapps and sites to change the information you’ve stored on each ofthem.
Read also:
Ex-Foursquare Designers Release Social Calendar App for iPhone (Mashable)
“Futuristic App” Makes Its Way to the Apple App Store: Sunrise Reinvents IOS … (The Droid Guy)
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