📣 Launching my app CalendarNotes as an MVP to the General Public

Howdy IH! 👋

My name is Matt, and I'm the solo software developer behind CalendarNotes.io, an app to help Google Calendar users create and organize their meeting notes. Today, I'm launching the MVP of CalendarNotes as an open beta to the general public, urging individuals such as yourself to try it out and let me know if you think you'd use it on a regular basis!

Background

If you're anything like me, you use Google Calendar a ton. As a remote software developer, virtually (no pun intended) every single meeting I have at work is scheduled via Google Meet/Google Calendar.

I couldn't help but wonder why Google hadn't made an easy way to quickly take notes and save those notes somewhere I could easily refer back to later. There's so much valuable information attached to each calendar event, the possibilities for a meeting notes generation tool are endless.

I figured if Microsoft could do it, why couldn't it be done for Google?

Enter CalendarNotes.io

The app is pretty basic in its current state. When you sign up for CalendarNotes, you'll be asked to provide the application with read-only access to your Google Calendars, as well as write-access to individual calendar events.

Once signed up, you'll be redirected to the dashboard of the application. The dashboard is automatically populated with a list of events from your primary Google Calendar associated with the Google Account you used during registration. If you have access to more than one Google Calendar from your Google Account, you'll be able to view those with the dropdown at the top of the dashboard. Please note, if you don't have "write" permissions to the other calendars your Google Account has access to, you won't be able to see any events from those calendars.

You might notice the "Create Notes" button to the right of each event isn't clickable just yet. Let's fix that.

On the left hand side of the dashboard, click the "Google Drive" button to sign in with Google Drive. Upon signing in with Google Drive, a "CalendarNotes" folder will be created in your "My Drive", which will be used to house the meeting notes created by the app.

Navigate back to the CalendarNotes dashboard and click the checkbox next to the CalendarNotes folder on the left side of the dashboard, and click "Create Notes" for whatever meeting you'd like!

Now, take a look at the event that you just created notes for on your Google Calendar. You'll see a new event, called "_Notes" next to the original event, and upon clicking the "_Notes" event, you'll see a link to the meeting notes file created for you with the title and date of the original event, a list of attendees, and a spot to take meeting notes.

Security and Privacy

In terms of privacy, we only store basic user data (name, email, profile picture), as well as the data we need to read and write to your Google Calendars. Mainly, Google Access Tokens for the Drive and Calendar API. We do not store any information about your actual calendar events in our databases; all of the logic to read and create meeting notes is stored in memory, and immediately deleted once requests are completed. We store our data in MongoDB Atlas, our API is hosted on Digital Ocean and runs in a Docker Container, and the front end is built in Next.js and served from Vercel's CDN network.

Looking Ahead

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the direction CalendarNotes could go from here.

• I could create a browser extension that adds a "Create Notes" button on each calendar event directly within your Google Calendar, so that you don't need to log into the dashboard.
• I could integrate the application with any other calendar with a public API, such as iCal or Microsoft Outlook.
• I could integrate the application to use different meeting notes locations outside of Google Docs; maybe you'd like meeting note templates generated in Notion, Asana, etc.
• I could find a way to fetch the transcript from the meeting and use speech-to-text to add the transcript to the meeting notes file for easy CMD/CTRL + F'ing.

Rather than thinking of ideas that might be useful, I want to release the app in its current state to get feedback and learn which ideas would actually be useful. That's where I'm hoping you come in!

I'm hoping that if you are a Google Calendar user yourself, that you might be willing to take the time to sign up and try it out for your own needs. If it works for your needs, that's great! If not, please don't hesitate to tell me why, either in a comment below or in a DM on Twitter.

I'm open to any and all bug fix requests, feature ideas, etc... This is my first real launch of an app I've built myself, and I'm very excited to see where it goes!

Thank you to everyone in this community for inspiring me to launch and maintain CalendarNotes — this community is awesome, and I'm extremely happy to be a part of it.