Google Calendar vs Now for Reddit

The app leverages Google Maps when adding location for an event by offering suggestions as well as offers opening Maps to help get directions to an event via shortcut on a reminder notification.

Google Calendar is a free Android calendar app without ads that comes already installed on Android devices that have stock support for Google Services.

Google Calendar has a monochrome base design that's accented with colored-coded events and image banners that separate months in schedule view.

The app has 5 different views - schedule, day, 3-day, week and month.

Day, 3-day and week views split up the days horizontally and hours vertically. Month view lays out all days in a grid and displays up to 3 events in a day.

Schedule view displays an agenda view that allows browsing all events by swiping vertically. Additionally, the way events are displayed in the agenda view is context-aware. For example, adding an event called "gym" will display the event on a background with a dumbbell.

All views except for month view can be split horizontally to display a condensed month view at the top that can be navigated by swiping horizontally.

Events can be added from any view by clicking the red plus button that's available at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Google Calendar integrates with e-mail for quickly creating events from e-mails that contain the word "meeting" or dates or times, or any other information about events or plans that it can understand.

Google calendar allows setting how many reminders are needed with each having the ability to set how long before the event the notification should remind and if it should be done via on-screen or e-mail notification.

Google Calendar is part of the Google ecosystem, it integrates with services like Google Now for creating events, Google Maps for directions and Gmail for pulling information about planned flights.

The app will color-code different calendars in different colors as well as allow selecting a different color for each event.

All views have an option of adding a new event by tapping the plus sign at the lower right corner of the screen. This opens up a form and allows the user to add a location, start/end times, guests, description, color-code as well as choosing if it's an all day event, how often it repeats, how many and what kind of reminders are needed and setting the users availability and privacy settings.

Whenever you enter agenda / event title with the keywords (when available), the event will show up interesting flairs whenever the keyword inside the agenda / title you typed matches the flairs that are available inside the system, examples such as haircut, cycling, swimming, coffee, movie etc.

Through the Google Calendar's web client, it is possible to subscribe to any public calendar. Google also maintains a list of public calendars for various sports events and holidays in different countries and for different religions.

Google Calendar can be integrated with any calendar that support iCalendar format, including Exchange and iCloud, via URL, but it has to be done using the web client.

Google Calendar comes with a home screen widget, and there are also many third party widgets developed for this calendar app.

IFTTT offers over 198 channels to plug into the users Google Calendar.

With the card-based UI, the app fits in very well design wise with the Material Design of the OS. Everything is intuitive to use being that the interface is familiar and follows Google's design guidelines.

Now for Reddit utilizes the transparent nav bar implemented in Android 4.4+, making for a cleaner looking interface.

The design of the icon for Now for Reddit is clean, simple and fits well with material design.

Now for Reddit is one of the few Reddit clients that come with the ability to change how much content can be viewed on the screen. You'd also be hard pressed to find another Reddit client that can show you full-size images (via full-size cards) without you having even tapped on the image.

Keep in mind that the configurable card sizes might also have an impact on battery consumption, ranging from tiny cards (most battery efficient) to full size cards (most battery/data hungry).

The design of the app lends itself well to phones and tablets alike no matter the orientation that the device is being held in. Not having to switch apps depending on the users device is a nice feature.

Using Android's profile GPU rendering tool it can be clearly shown how the Now for Reddit is generally more responsive than quite a few of the other popular reddit clients. For people obsessive about the 60 FPS mark, it would be hard to find a near 60 FPS experience as good as Now for Reddit.