ProtonCalendar – A Sneak Peek

Monday, December 30, 2019

ProtonMail announced today that ProtonCalendar is available as a beta version for all paid ProtonMail users and this blog post is a compilation of what it looks like.

After going to https://beta.protonmail.com and logging in you will notice a new icon to the left with “ProtonCalendar” when you hover over it:

Click on it and it will start preparing your very own (encrypted) calendar. After it completes after a couple of seconds you will see:

Click on Continue and you will see your calendar, by default set to “Week” view:

There are 3 distinct areas:

  • Top: Calendar settings
  • Left: New event button, mini-month calendar quick jump, and a listing of your calendars (currently you cannot create new ones)
  • Main: Calendar view of your events with the ability to jump to today’s date, previous/next, currently displayed date range, timezone, and Day/Week/Month toggle buttons

At the top-right corner you can change between day/week/month views, here is day:

…and month:

Clicking on the “New event” button at the top-left corner will open up a modal dialog:

And the bottom half:

All options typed out:

  • Title: event title
  • All day: checkbox if the event is all day
  • Time: (if not all day) you can set the event start date and times
  • Frequency: if the event repeats (options: weekly, monthly, yearly)
  • Start timezone
  • End timezone
  • Calendar: choose a calendar to create the event under
  • Location
  • Description
  • Notifications: ability to add multiple notifications

Exploring a bit more, let’s click on “Settings” in the top-right corner:

Available settings:

  • Time format: 12h or 24h
  • Primary timezone
  • Secondary timezone
  • Default view: Day, Week (default), or Month
  • Week start: Monday (default) or Sunday
  • Week numbers (default: enabled)

Let’s click on “Calendars” in the left navigation:

Understandably, currently you are unable to create new calendars. Let’s click on “Edit” for the default calendar:

Available options:

  • Name
  • Color
  • Default email
  • Display
  • Description

Clicking on the “Event settings” tab will let you modify default event settings (event duration, notifications, full day notifications):

I created various event types (single-day, spanning, and recurring (weekly)) to see how they are presented in the calendar. Note that the “30” preview tooltip appeared after I clicked on the “2 more” text in the December 30 box.

A fully-functioning beta as far as I can tell, and excited to see it mature over 2020.

Copy/pasting from the ProtonCalendar blog post, with bolded parts by me:

Currently, you can use the ProtonCalendar beta to create and delete events, set reminders, and have your events repeat every day, week, or month.

The current iteration of ProtonCalendar is an early beta. There will be substantial developments between now and when the project is publicly released. Over the course of the beta, additional features will be added such as the ability to share your calendar with other ProtonMail users and send event invites to anyone, even non-ProtonMail users. It will also make scheduling as easy as a single click by letting you sync events in your ProtonMail inbox with ProtonCalendar.

While ProtonCalendar is only available in the web version of ProtonMail for now, we will also be bringing ProtonCalendar to iOS and Android with dedicated mobile apps in 2020.

While we are excited to release the ProtonCalendar beta today to get initial feedback from the community, we realize there is still work to be done. We look forward to receiving and incorporating your input so that ProtonCalendar can meet all of your calendar needs.

We believe everyone has the right to plan dinner with friends without announcing to Google who will attend. For that reason, once ProtonCalendar is publicly released, a basic version will be available to all ProtonMail users (including Free users) while paid Proton users will benefit from additional functionality.

ProtonCalendar Blog Post

ProtonCalendar Security Model