Google Calendar as a native Mac app

Google Calendar has no Mac app of its own, so on a Mac it is a browser tab, a side panel in Gmail, or a third-party client. Hark is the third kind, with one difference: the calendar sits next to your Gmail in the same window, and everything you do on it is written through Google’s own API — the web and your phone see it the moment you do it.

The views

Day, Week, Month, Year and Schedule, plus the custom spans Google offers: 4 days, 2 weeks and 4 weeks. The week starts on the day your Google settings say, because Hark reads that setting rather than guessing; times are shown in your Mac’s time zone. The current time is a line through today, all-day events sit in a strip above the hours, and a month cell with more than it can show folds the rest behind a count, the way the web does.

The grid is measured against Google’s, deliberately: the hour height, the header, the colour of each calendar’s chips, the weight of a title. The aim is that a week in Hark reads exactly like the week you already know.

Editing, not just looking

• Create by dragging. Drag across the grid to make an event, and a quick-create card opens on it; open the full editor for guests, description, reminders, colour and the rest.
• Move and resize by dragging. Drag an event to another time or day, drag its edge to change its length, and an Undo toast appears if you meant something else.
• Recurring events, with the right scope. Editing one of a series asks the question Google asks — this event, this and following, or all — and writes the answer through the API.

Your calendars, and other people’s

• Show, hide and colour. The sidebar lists your calendars and the ones shared with you, each in a colour you can change. Ticking one on or off is synced to Google, so the choice follows you to the web.
• Create, rename, delete and share. Make a new calendar for a project, give it the name you want to see it under, and share it with a person by their address — the sharing is Google’s, done from Hark.
• Subscribe. Add a calendar someone shared by its address, or a published feed by its webcal or https link.
• Meet with. Type a colleague’s name and their calendar is laid over yours, so you can see the free hour without leaving your own week.

Where the calendar meets your mail

This is the part a standalone calendar cannot do. An invitation arrives in Gmail, and in Hark the message shows the event as a card with Yes, No and Maybe on it. Answering there writes straight through to your calendar, and the event appears on the grid one click away. An invitation that arrived as an attached .ics file gets the same card.

There is a longer piece on why that seam is the point of having both in one app: Gmail and your calendar in one native Mac app.

Google Tasks, beside the grid

Your task lists open in a panel next to the calendar. Create, rename and delete lists; add tasks with details and a due date; complete them, reorder them, keep subtasks under a task. Drag a task onto a day and it is scheduled for that day. The Schedule view lists each day’s tasks alongside its events, so the day reads as one plan.

What Google keeps for the web

Some of Google Calendar is not reachable through the Calendar API, for any app. Rather than hide those things, Hark shows the ones that have a place in the interface marked as unavailable — Appointment schedule sits greyed out in the Create menu, and an event’s type is shown but locked. The full list:

• Appointment schedules. Booking pages are made and managed on the web.
• Proposing a new time. The API can accept or decline an invitation but cannot send a counter-proposal.
• Changing an event’s type. Whether an event is a regular event, a focus-time block or an out-of-office is fixed when it is created; Hark shows the type and does not pretend it can be changed.

Requirements

macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon. A Gmail or Google Workspace account; one per install while Hark is in beta.

Questions