One of the big things that Dates doesn't yet do is recurring events. Not really due to difficulty, I'm just having a hard time thinking of a way to present it sensibly on a small screen. Some examples of other apps:
Evolution's recurring event dialogue
GPE's recurring event dialogue
Evolution's looks fairly sane (or at least as sane as setting detailed recurrence can look..), but is far too big. GPE's is obviously lacking some polish, but I have issue with dialogues that have invisible options that magically pop up (discoverability).
I've finished a very preliminary design of what I think may be suitable for Dates, but some feedback (and screenshots of other applications) would be appreciated so I can get some perspective.
Preliminary design for Dates' recurrence dialogue
Skee Lo - I Wish
sam says:
should probably be
until: forever
rather than
until: 00000000
you probably need a set of use cases:
the 3th of every month
every monday
every second wednesday
the 2th thursday of every month
the tuesday after a bank holiday
Bastien Nocera says:
Chris, drop me a mail, I'll send you screenies of what the Palm does for recurring events (it's simple enough to cater for most needs).
Renato says:
You should also find some way to place an event in specific days of the week (such as "at 5 pm of every tuesday and friday").
I know, it's messy :-)
Bye, and keep up the wonderful work with Dates!
jauco says:
The UIQ calendar on my phone has a pretty straightforward interface.
basically it is a list with options
Recurrence
O None
O Daily
O Weekly
O Monthly on date
O Monthly on day
O Yearly on date
O Yearly on day
Interval [1]
O Always
O Until [ ]
And a button to choose the days of the week the occurance should be. (so you can say Work is weekly on monday and friday)
This offers all the options in a really small screen
Peteris Krisjanis says:
I like this interface, maybe for some additional configuration like interval, but in overall, I love it.
Peter Robinson says:
Hi Chris,
Looking good! The only request I would have is to make it wider than longer so it'll work nicely and be easier to port to something like the Nokia 770 (which BTW I have eds/dates running in the Maemo Dev env).
Cheers,
Pete
Ploum says:
Also, I must say that the choosing of the day in GPE is really bad. If I choose weekly for an event since 24/03 and 24/03 is a friday, GPE should guess that I want it every friday.
I can't count the number of time of a reccurence that I've added to a monday.
Your dialog seems very sane.
Joachim Noreiko says:
I think an "x times" as an alternative to "until date" would be useful.
Some people know they have 3 hospital appointments, but they can't work out in their heads to what day that takes them.
Putting documentation in the interface is generally not a good thing to do, and I'm not even sure what the tip means here anyway. (Put a help button instead.)
Other than that, looks very nice.
Marius Gedminas says:
Palm gets it right. I don't have screenshots, but here's the rendition in ASCII.
Change Repeat:
[ None | Day | Week | Month | Year ]
When you choose Day, you also get
Every: [...1] day(s)
End on [No end date]
(click on the 'end on' button to get a calendar popup)
When you choose Week, you also get
Every: [...1] week(s)
End on [No end date]
Repeat on: [ M | T | W | T | F | S | S ]
When you choose Month, you also get
Every: [...1] month(s)
End on [No end date]
Repeat by: [ Day | Date ]
where repeat by day is for things like "4th Friday of every month", and repeat by date is for "24th of every month"
When you choose Year, you get
Every: [...1] years(s)
End on [No end date]
There is also a box at the bottom that describes your rule in words:
"March 24th every second year"
"Every other week on Tue and Fri"
etc.
Alexander Larsson says:
What theme is that? I like it.
Mike Stanley says:
Hi Chris,
Dates looks great. It may be reason (excuse) enough for me to run out and pick up a Nokia 770. Or offer a bounty to anyone that can get GPE running on a PSP.
May I suggest perhaps not trying to squeeze it on one screen? Why not have the reoccurence selection on one screen and the exceptions on another?
I agree with Marius though. The palm does allow for a great deal of flexibility in reoccurence (sans the exceptions).
Good luck!
- Mike
Chris Lord says:
Thanks for all the comments - Bastien sent me screens of the PalmOS calendar and I've seen screens of the Mac OSX calendar now, so I'll do my best to come up with the best implementation I can :)
And the theme is Human-Blue
MDK says:
Is it possible to sync it to Evolution when running on N770?
Any comments?
