iPhone calendar sharing made easy with Tungle

by Craik Pyke on 04/05/10 at 5:00 am

Craik Pyke is telecommunications architect and software developer specializing in mobile applications and a Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Scheduling meetings with parties outside of your business can be time consuming at best and unnecessarily frustrating at worst. It’s often difficult (e.g. via Google Calendar) to make your availability known to others without making your entire calendar available to a large group of people.

That’s where Tungle Corporation comes into play. Tungle

offers a hosted services called Tungle.me. Tungle’s service focuses on doing one thing really well, allowing you to share your availability with anyone without compromising the security of the data within your calendar.

Tungle interfaces with any of four calendar sources:

Google Calendar

iCal (and Entourage via iCal)

Microsoft Outlook

Lotus Notes

When interfacing with Google Calendar, the Tungle service directly retrieves data from Google’s servers. For the other services, Tungle uses a “connector” service which syncs data from you primary computer to the Tungle servers. Running Tungle on my Mac is completely seamless and unnoticeable, keeping the Tungle servers synchronized with the user’s availability according to iCal. Tungle does upload event names to the server. When the user is viewing their own calendar via the web-based administrative interface, they can see the events, however that information is not published to anyone it’s not explicitly shared with. There is also a “sharing” capability where the user can select specific people with whom to share availability and even calendar details. This permits quick access to their calendars and quick booking of meetings with frequently included participants.

Permitting people to book meetings is as simple as giving them a Tungle.me link. The person seeking to book an appointment doesn’t even require a Tungle account; they simply select a set of times that works best and it shows them my availability. The Tungle user receives a meeting request and is able to select the meeting time that best suites (knowing that the proposed list of times are all based on available slots in their calendar).

The iPhone application is not only the perfect complement to the Tungle.me service, it actually replaces the need for the web interface (for most tasks). Launching Tungle brings the user to their home-screen showing their upcoming meetings as well as a quick view of Tungle users you’ve shared your availability/calendar data with. From there the user may either schedule an appointment or manage appointments requested or booked via Tungle. It’s in this simplicity of interface that Tungle excels. When booking a meeting, the user can create a meeting request via the contact list (including standard Address Book entries as well as Tungle contacts) or via email address. Choosing a meeting time is as simple as finding an open time slot (in the user’s calendar, and in the other attendees’ calendars if they’re also Tungle users). There’s no need for back-and-forth emails or phone calls to set up meetings.

The iPhone app is exactly what it claims to be; scheduling made easy. Tungle doesn’t strive to replace the users regular calendaring application, nor does it seek to be more than the root application. It is a simplified mechanism to set up meetings with people outside of a user’s direct reach without the waste of negotiating an appropriate time.

Tungle’s simplicity has made it one of the applications I use routinely and has earned a spot on my iPhone’s home-screen. Given the promise that the existing service will remain free, it’s hard to not find Tungle the ideal meeting scheduling tool.

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