hora Calendar 1.1: Google Tasks, Meeting Rooms, and Finding a Time

The biggest release since hora launched is here, and it is not another view of the calendar. Google Calendar always did more than show events: it holds your tasks, your meeting rooms, and the quiet back and forth of finding a time that works for everyone. Until now, hora left all of that to the browser.

This release brings it into the app. Tasks live in the sidebar and on the grid. Meeting rooms show up in the same field where you invite people. A new availability view lines up everyone's calendar so you can see the one slot that actually works. And when an invitation does not fit, you can propose a better time without leaving hora.

Your Google Tasks, without leaving the calendar

Google Tasks lists now live in hora. They sync on the same cycle as your calendars, so a task added on your phone shows up here without a separate refresh to think about.

The sidebar has a Tasks widget with Google's own composer, so adding a task feels the same as it does in Google Calendar or Gmail. Tasks also appear directly on the Day, Week, and Month grids next to your events, and you can drag one onto the grid to give it a time. Google only stores the date for a task, never the hour, so that placement is something hora remembers locally on your Mac rather than something written back to Google.

Tick a task off anywhere and it is done everywhere: on the grid, in the sidebar, and in Google Tasks itself. Tasks get their own Settings tab: which lists show up, where they appear, which list a new task lands in by default, and what happens to completed and overdue work. If you would rather see an overdue task on today instead of the day it was originally due, that is a toggle now, and it changes nothing in Google itself. You can also give a list its own colour, the same way you already colour a calendar, by right clicking it in the sidebar.

Booking a room without leaving the invite

If your Mac is on a Google Workspace account, hora now reads your organisation's room directory. Rooms show up in the same field where you already add guests, so booking one is not a separate step.

Rooms list the building they are in rather than a resource name that means nothing to you, and a room's availability is checked at the same time as everyone else's, so you will not send an invite to a room that is already taken. If your account has no room directory, the field simply stays a guest list, exactly as it was before. There is nothing to configure and nothing that breaks.

Finding a time everyone actually has

Open the availability popover in the event editor and hora reads every attendee's free and busy time at once. Their days line up side by side in coloured lanes, so the gaps where the whole group is free are visible immediately instead of something you have to work out by switching between calendars.

Once you see the right slot, one click puts the event there. It is the same problem Google Calendar's own Find a Time solves in the browser, now built into the event editor you are already using.

A cleaner way to say not quite

Right click an event someone invited you to, and hora now opens Google Calendar's own proposal page in your browser, with the right event and the right account already selected. It replaces the awkward choice between accepting a time that does not work and declining with no alternative at all.

This only shows up on invitations from other people. An event you organise yourself has no reason to propose a new time to yourself, so hora keeps the option where it actually makes sense.

Where you are working, right on the calendar

The location Google Calendar shows for each day, office, home, or wherever you have set it, now has its own row above your all day events. A run of days at the same place draws as one label and one unbroken line, the same way Google draws it, and you can set or change a day's location directly from that row instead of opening Google Calendar in a browser to do it.

A sidebar you arrange yourself

The right sidebar now holds Agenda and Tasks widgets with a divider you can drag to split the height between them however you actually use them. A new Settings tab controls which widgets appear and in what order, so the sidebar can match how you work rather than a fixed layout hora picked for you.

hora starts where your Google Calendar settings already are

On a fresh install, hora now reads your week start, clock format, default event length, whether declined events are visible, and whether weekends are hidden, straight from Google Calendar. It only fills in what is blank: anything you have already set inside hora stays exactly as you left it, and you can run the same import again at any time from Import settings from Google.

A handful of Google's own toggles have somewhere to live too. You can add Google Meet to events you create, get alerts only for events you have actually answered, and choose whether invitations still waiting for your reply show up on the grid at all.

A few smaller connections came with this release too. Teams and Zoom meetings now open directly in their own apps instead of bouncing through a browser tab first. Attendee faces are pulled from Google People, and if you would rather hora left your Mac's address book alone entirely, that is now a choice rather than the default. A calendar can appear on the grid without cluttering the sidebar agenda, and declined events can be hidden from the grid completely if you do not want to see them at all.

Smaller things that add up

Sidebar sections now fold away and stay folded, which matters as soon as you have more than one account's worth of calendars listed. Both sidebars share one set of headings and type sizes, and the Text Size setting now reaches the Invitations list and the task chips, two places it never used to touch.

Task chips take their colours from the same system events already use, so they hold contrast in both light and dark mode and share an event's title size. Weekends are shaded a shade darker across the all day and working location rows too, not only the hour grid underneath them.

Onboarding turns the page instead of cross fading between screens, and a first run now opens straight into setup instead of a splash screen that shrinks away. Sync diagnostics record how many of your calendars are actually switched on rather than just how many hora knows about, and a lighter resync option can refetch everything from Google without touching the events you already have locally. Stepping a day at a time no longer rebuilds the whole grid, and a resize handle now belongs to whichever column your pointer is actually over.

Bugs that are gone

The divider between sidebar widgets used to stop responding for the rest of the session once a resize hit its limit. Tasks could disappear from the all day row entirely, or in Day view spill onto the row above it, because that row measured itself from events and forgot tasks were sitting there too. A busy day in Month view could draw past the bottom of its own cell, cutting a task or an event in half.

The list a new task went to used to be decided in two different places, so the same new task could land in different lists depending on where you started creating it. And removing an account now takes its tasks and rooms with it, instead of leaving them behind.

hora 1.1 is here. If tasks, meeting rooms, and scheduling have been scattered across browser tabs while Google Calendar stays your source of truth, this is the update built to pull them back into hora. Try hora, and see how much of that browser tab you can close.