Review: Kiko, the Calendar

We’ve all done it. We’ve gone with the biggest and brawniest – the Walmarts, the Microsofts – instead of looking to those in their shadow to find what we’re looking for. Even right now, I’m writing this review in MS Word, perhaps the most ubiquitous processor out there. I could very well achieve a fine document from something like Open Office. I’d even prefer to look to the little guy to get the job done, but there are always a few factors that have kept them one step behind.

That said, things aren’t always bad for the “common folk” of applications, whether desktop or web-based in nature. In fact, they can be astonishingly good. Enter, Kiko.

Kiko’s a cool name. It’s catchy. But either I’m missing something, or it alludes to little or nothing about the product it’s associated with. Rather than go on and tease you with hints as to what Kiko’s specialty is, however, I’ll just get right to it.

Kiko’s a calendar. It’s functional, it’s willing to change to suit your needs, and it is as suave as any in its class. Click about the page, the options menus, its various trinkets, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. About three minutes into a test run, I was as comfortable with the layout and functions as I am in iCal, my main appointment-keeper. Kiko might even excel iCal in some ways, but perhaps that’s a premature assertion. Or is it?

You can test Kiko without signing in whatsoever, which is nice, because there’s nothing more irritating if you’re a self-professed software fanatic and have to keep track of gazillions of user names and passwords for the stuff you’ve tried out, adopted, and shunned ever since you got your first email account. Regardless, when you enter into the application, you’ll notice a “sparseness”, and it’d be somewhat cumbersome to have to fill out an entire month of items just to see whether it feels right to you. That’s why it’s great to see that Kiko’s developers have taken it upon themselves to introduce a sample calendar with the demo, titled ‘Daniel Example’. The sample is meant to show Kiko in action and allow you to see the monthly, weekly, daily, and ‘upcoming appointments’ as they would look if you had laid out your own schedule.

You immediately notice through tooling about with Kiko that the ease of entry is nothing if not commendable. I reviewed Google Calendar here on Profy, and I must say, Kiko has it pegged when it comes to entering information, at least while the full-month view is displayed. The text is quite legible, and you can attribute ‘labels’ to provide yourself with more selectiveness down the line. For example, if you’d mash together personal and business items on your calendar to keep track of your entire schedule, it’s nice to have labels present so you can concentrate on upcoming meetings while at work; and look only at the kids’ sports practice schedulings while at your home PC. Also, if you have an entire year sculpted out in iCal, Outlook, or even in Yahoo! Calendar, you won’t want to start over. For that, an import option is available. Exporting is possible, but only the ‘.ics’ format is available. For users not familiar with the file type, it is one formatted for iCal compatibility.

While getting to know Kiko’s interface, I noticed that the vertical blue bar separating calendar and menu, which I took to be a barrier, doubled as a simple and effective space saver. Click the bar to disappear the mini-calendar to the right and the menu to the left and you’ve got yourself a browser-wide grid to work with. Click the bar again (now aligned to the edge of the browser window) and you’re back to the default view. I can see many, many people using this tool, particularly those intent on keeping Kiko available at all times, enlargened.

If you have to present a public calendar as an open web page, offer events as an RSS feed, or even paste an ‘event roll’ to your private web page or blog, Kiko also delivers. Come to think of it, there’s really little that Kiko won’t do, and by the time you get around to figuring out what that is, chances are the developers will have already introduced the missing link. If you so happen to be proud of your Kiko calendar, you can paste a ‘badge’ of honor to your web page announcing your allegiance.

Of course, not everyone can like everything about Kiko, and though my list of pet peeves is short – very short, actually – I’ll voice a gripe just to prove this isn’t a canned promotion.

What’s my beef with Kiko? Tabs. I’m cool with working a bunch of tabs in Firefox or Safari. They help a lot. But when you’re dealing with settings or whathaveyou, and you click back to the main calendar view, a tab remains. That makes one ‘close’ button too for me. It could be handy for those that get distracted from an entry-in-progress, but I find it antithetical to the site’s management style.

Most online calendars are quite impressive, and I will say that Google Calendar had me on the verge of converting, but Kiko wins my vote for ‘best in show’. It’s got everything I need and lets me get on with my business. Chalk one up for the little guy. This one’s a winner.