I built an unofficial Google Calendar desktop widget — works on Windows, Mac, and Linux

#webdev #javascript #opensource #electron

There's no official Google Calendar desktop app. If you want to check your schedule, you open a browser tab, navigate to calendar.google.com, and squint at whatever month it loaded last. Fine once. Annoying by the fifteenth time.

So I built google-calender-widget — an Electron app that puts your Google Calendar events in a proper desktop window. Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Ships a system tray icon. Dark mode included.

How it works

The app authenticates via Google OAuth — log in once, and your events appear in a clean agenda view from then on. No browser tabs needed. A tray icon lets you open and close the window with a single click.

Stack is Electron + JavaScript. I wanted something that would actually run everywhere without distribution headaches. Electron handles that: one codebase, three platforms, binary installers for each. Latest release is v1.1.6 (September 2025).

One non-obvious detail

Getting Google OAuth working cleanly inside Electron is a small puzzle. The standard redirect-URI flow expects a web server to receive the callback — but there's no server in a native app. The fix is registering a custom URI protocol. The OAuth flow redirects to something like google-calendar-widget://auth/callback, and the Electron main process intercepts it. Small thing, but it's the difference between login that works and login that sort-of works with weird edge cases.