Calendar Indicator: See Your Google Calendar In Ubuntu’s Tray [Linux]

Calendar Indicator: See Your Google Calendar In Ubuntu’s Tray [Linux]:
Click one button in the tray and see what you need to do today. Calendar Indicator gives you quick access to your upcoming Google Calendar appointments, and doesn’t rely on any other software to get that information. This means you don’t need Evolution to see your appointments in the tray.
Evolution, the Linux answer to Microsoft’s Outlook, is no longer included by default in Ubuntu. There’s a reason for this – it was occasionally buggy, frequently slow and too complicated for new users to figure out. But it also integrated nicely into Ubuntu, especially when it comes to calendars. Clicking the clock brings up a calendar, as most Ubuntu users know. Clicking the clock when you’ve got your calendars set up with Evolution also brings up your appointments.
Calendar Indicator, sadly, isn’t integrated into the calendar like that; instead, it’s an icon in the tray you can click to see a list of upcoming appointments, and it only supports Google’s calendar server. But Calendar Indicator is lightweight, speedy and very easy to use, and Google offers the best calendar service out there.

Using Calendar Indicator

The first time you start Calendar Indicator you’ll need to enter your Google username and password. Do so and a calendar icon will be added to your tray; its number is that of the current day.
Click the icon and you’ll see your upcoming appointments:

Oh man, I’ve got some manuals to edit. A list of upcoming appoinments is a great way to get yourself ready for the week ahead or month ahead, so this overview is great. Clicking the appoinments, sadly, does nothing.
If you’d like to see the days you’re free in the coming month, you can click the “Show Calendar” button to (oddly enough) show a calendar.

Bold days have appoinments; hover over such a day to see them in the tooltip.
There aren’t many options, but you can easily set the program to launch at boot and change the icon’s theme:

It’s a simple application, to be sure, but it’s functional.

Installing Calendar Indicator

To install this program in Ubuntu you will need to add the “atareao/atareao” PPA. Not sure how to do this? You could check out Y PPA, a GUI tool for managing your PPAs. Otherwise, just open up the Terminal and paste this code:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
This will add the repository securely. Once you’ve added it, update your package manager and install “calendar-indicator“. If your Terminal is still open, you can do both those things with these two commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install calendar-indicator
Looking through the (Spanish) homepage for Atareao it seems this project is mostly for Ubuntu. This makes sense: it’s an indicator applet for Unity. So I can’t find installation instructions for other distros, but if you can, feel free to add them in the comments below.

Conclusion

This program has one major shortcoming – it doesn’t support multiple calendars. If you use Google Calendar for more than the default calendar, you’re out of luck (though I hope this changes in future versions!)
As always, I want to hear what you think. Is this indicator useful, or would you prefer integration into Ubuntu’s built-in calendar? Let me know in the comments below.