Show HN: New calendar app idea
oneviewcalendar.com
oneviewcalendar.com
It's developed as a web app, thats wy it could be integrated directly on the landing page. It can also be run on any device directly from http://app.oneviewcalendar.com
Instead of the traditional monthview and day view I have used a timeline that is zoomable and scrollable. Give it a try, it's quite a different experience.
Please leave me a comment :)
Is it your intention to proselytise this particular UI concept (i.e., “Everyone should use this type of calender view! It makes calendering better for everyone. Get inspired and go implement it in your own software!”) or to test the waters for a commercial product?
In any event, looks fantastic and best of luck.
I'd pay as much as I paid for Fantastical for your native iOS app with CalDAV support, right now. Even more, to make sure you keep developing it.
If you're certain it has to stay free, please consider open sourcing it. Shopping for critical Apps every three years 'cause authors got bored of it is painful.
Some autocompleteness on the 'Where's could be good. Can you make time input easier?
Shifting between calendars needs to be very easy. I used to use Gcal, and I was forever putting events in the wrong calendar.
Furthermore, scrolling in the details doesn't work properly. (Firefox on OSX) Really nice app for the phone!
- Synching between apps (a fairly straightforward process, but still has to be done, given enough interest on the app [which it looks like you might have])
- System Webviews != Chrome or Safari (depending on iOS/Android version).
I would be happy to hunt this on ProductHunt as well, hit me up on twitter http://twitter.com/joantune if you want to schedule a date or simply reply here and I'll post it there.
Cheers, and good job, it looks good
I agree that it will be great to be able to target touch pads or mouse/keyboards but I believe it is pretty simple to fix the UX on this app.
http://caniuse.com/#search=pointer%20events
For a traditional PC interface, there isn't such a natural way of handling this interface.
I hope to help you somehow, I opensourced that small thing I built then: https://bitbucket.org/yuchi/dirt-testing-1
It’s written in Coffee Script (sorry, it was all the rage in 2012) but if you create an HTTP server in the root of the project everything should work out of the box because I checked in the compiled sources. To zoom in and out use shift-drag.
Probably something to do with the ad hoc compiler and lack of ES6 support.
See https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributor...
- Future compatible, more interoperable
- ES6 classes can extend each other in a standards compliant way
- CS arrow functions feel verbose compared to ES6
- Constants
- More tooling support
- More features
- Upcoming features, like ES7 async/await have polyfills that you can use today (as opposed to CS - https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/pull/3813)
Though I do miss a couple of things:
- The last expression in a block is implicitly returned (nice sugar for functional programming)
- Ranges ([1..10])
It doesn't say anywhere that it's in "maintenance" mode.
But it's true that it could be more active: http://coffeescript.org/#changelog
https://github.com/ruby/ruby/graphs/contributors
https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors
UX preference: I would rather swipe sideways to scroll between days preserving time of day than scroll vertically through 24h to get to yesterday/tomorrow.
If I want to actually use this thing, how does it persist data? Is there a way to create an account, or do I have to never ever clear my browser cookies (or localStorage)? Accessing across different devices? Etc. (Not sure if this is just a UI proof of concept or an actual app you expect people to use).
Do you have someone to build it? I'd totally be willing to give it a go.
* I dislike how the website hijacks scrolling, the phone doesn't fit on a Macbook 13" screen so I tried to scroll down, but that just scrolled in the app
* When scrolling out to a view where I see many months at once it can only show a few events, in the demo it only shows Gym, and when I zoom in a bit more it also shows Hockey with kids. I feel these recurring events should have the lowest priority when zoomed out, it's more important to see "special" one-off events.
* It's not clear that there are events hidden. When zoomed out a lot it's of course expected that this is the case, but when zoomed out a bit more it might be unclear if all events for a time period are visible or not.
People don't do well when confronted with planning at that scale. Not only that, but when looking at decade scale, you probably don't want to see daily tasks bleeding in. It's one thing to see a five or ten year plan. It's another to see that you're still planning on going to the gym at 8:30, June 7th, 2026.
Awesome work though, I love it!
The vision I had was a horizontal rather than vertical timeline and discrete rather than continuous zooming (though I thought a lot about implementing continuous scrolling). Yours might be the better way to do it, at least for mobile.
In any case, I think existing calendar apps fall short. There's no support for planning anything that extends out of the current month. The absolute worst is when you're in the last week of the month and you don't even see things coming up in the next few days. Someone has a birthday and you don't even see it until it's too late. And what about planning things (trips, 30 day challenges, contracts) that last weeks or months?
I even think that the shorter perspective affects our ability to do long term thinking.
One issue I ran into (on a MacBook Pro, OSX El Cap) was that scrolling wouldn't work on my (external) trackpad. It interpreted 2-finger scroll as pinch (down) and zoom (up). Had to use trackball to scroll.
Hope that helps.
Two typographic things on the recurrence settings: frequence should read frequency, "week days" is a bit confusing, I'd probably change it to "on these days"
Peter Molyneux, the designer of Black & White and Fable? Or just the same name?
Feel free to use the contact form for any questions or if you just want the IPhone version.
Cheers, Peter
That is a very "now" view of time.
I like my calendar to act as an archive, a diary that writes itself simply through living.
In the moment I may want to only see the beginning and end of a long-running event, but on the whole I want to see what happened/is happening at the given time frame in the past/future.
A few thoughts on navigation: I'm on a mac and I felt that the zoom using the "scroll wheel" (i.e. track pad) was pretty disorienting. I was expecting it to scroll. Having to click and hold down to scroll doesn't feel right.
I also instinctively thought the arrow keys would work but they didn't. I'd suggest up/down (obvious) and left = zoom out, right = zoom in.
That being said, the one feature I could really use in a calendar app is to have a sort of ledger column that I could use for budgeting. As a person juggling multiple part-time jobs, it would be invaluable for me to be able to plug in my expected shifts for the week, get an estimate of how much my paycheck would be, and calculate that against my bills for the week/month/year.
I never really found a good solution from this. I just happen to be on sabbatical from working and have a new kid so my life just doesn't work the same way.
Feedback: Is it possible to selectively enable/disable individual calendars? I have a "birthday" calendar from a large social network that results in multiple birthdays each day completely dominating the calendar. If I can't turn that off, it's virtually unusable for me unfortunately.
I tried to assign up for the Android beta but just received a confirmation email that I'd subscribed, no link to install the app. Is that to be expected?
[Edit: I just received a download link in an additional email. Thanks!]
Edit. I think it could also benefit from a 'snap to now' button somewhere. I don't have time to use your fancy GUI for literally seconds of my life to see what's going on this morning.
Just my 2c. Really nice app. (tu) I hope this doesn't come across as negative, I just want to help.
For example if I have Sunday the 10th at the top of the screen, and I two finger scroll/zoom, I'm preplexed why the date at the top shifts to earlier or later dates. This happens both directions. Maybe it's intentional, but it's unexpected (for me). I either want to zoom or scroll, not both.
I hope you take that as constructive. I really like it otherwise :)
In the case of your calendar I would prefer if the events that happen on the same time would "expand" much sooner. In the example if you want to see both morning-briefing and my-breakfast-day you need to zoom in to a day view. I would much rather see these events one under another in the "week" zoom level, especially since there is a lot of free space available.
Interesting idea, though.
I remember thinking when I saw that in an HCI course a couple of years ago that despite being over 30 years old it was a better calendar app UX than anything available that I was aware of!
[1] - see Fig. 6 of http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/r.spence/pubs/SA82.pdf
Other thing I'd love to see in a calendar app is prompting me to track the exact amount of time I spend on each thing in my calendar. Having contextual reminders and a split (planned/reality) view would be really interesting. It would help spot those people who are habitually late.
I use these things a lot currently (except for the separate start/end timezones cos no-one does that well, sadly)
Also, I get a QuotaExceededError for the key oneview_allEvents
(Otherwise, I think this is really great! on android I can just add it to my homescreen and it feels almost like a native app)
Maybe my calendars are too big ?
On the more construction side it would be nice to have to see at what time an event takes place by just glancing and no only by clicking or taping on it.
One suggestion is to auto arrange to different number of columns based on the current time unit. Though zooming would get weird -- it would have folding/unfolding effect or snaky undulations! Not sure if this is possible but such "zooming" can have other uses....
cool idea making it a web app
Additionally, the zooming mechanic could use some improvement, as it seems really jerky on my Macbook.
Good idea, best of luck with it!
My only criticism would be that the two vertical buttons/labels take up a fair chunk of the horizonal real estate.
Perhaps just show the right one, and use strings such as "December 2015" and "22 Thurs (Dec)"?
I have a suggestion: I love how when you tap a week number it zooms to that week. But I think it would be useful if it resets to the previous zooming if you tap it again.
It should have a way to remove it from view or not even import them at all.
Also (not that it matters), you misspelled 'hockey'.
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'populateCalendars' of undefined
Uncaught ReferenceError: moment is not definedI like it a lot. Feels much better than Google Calendar, for its simplicity (although in the browser it feels kinda odd).
I won't use it because I don't like calendars.
It would be nice if you could keep us (the HN crowd) updated on the business side of things.
I just wanted to say one thing, you can make it open source, or wait until someone else does it.
These are two levels of zoom pictured, that's the idea basically - you can zoom and scroll on the "timeline".
Does it support CalDAV?
I've moved away from Google Calendar to self-hosted CalDAV, but there's a frustrating lack of good Calendar apps that support it. I'd like to give this a try!
How do I get rid of all your items?