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Show HN: App for sharing your weekly schedule

thesetimes.info

38 pointsgodinaa23 comments

Howdy HN,

As a small side project, I built a small app to share weekly time schedules. It's been useful for me to help schedule meeting and share semester schedules with friends. I hope some others find some use with it.

I have a few more simple ideas to implement with it, and any suggestions are encouraged.

Thank you!

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This is a great idea. I'd definitely use it... IF it had a key feature that I think it's missing. I envision myself using something like this to plan a meeting. So say I'm a boss and I want to see when my employees are free. Right now as the site stands, they all send me their "thesetimes" and then I have to look at each one and then figure out where the free time slots are. What it should be is that as a boss, I send one out to all the employees, they fill out their busy times, and then as the boss I can see all the total busy times of all my employees overlaid so I know when I can schedule the meeting. At least this is how I envision something like this being useful, not just simply sending one persons free/open times, but that is definitely a good use case also.

Some bugs:

- click and drag a time down, but while moving your cursor to the right of the actual day you clicked on, let go, then click and drag down again real quick. You made two times, but they are linked now for some reason. They also delete together.

- permalink is not working

- i can drag outside the borders

- some other real weird funky stuff going on with the dragging. probably have to clean up a buncha bugs in your jquery

Other nice to haves/things to consider:

- drag up

- a line that shows where your cursor is hovering over with the time tooltipped or something like that, it's all approximate right now

- i never liked the term permalink. i think just link works better. but this is just my personal opinion.

Good start though! Good luck.

Woo, feedback! Thanks a ton. Some of the bugs you mentioned I've been aware of, just have not spent a lot of time to fix them. But specifically:

- some other real weird funky stuff going on with the dragging

I've got to go through and make sure I try every combination of dragging. That's definitely in the works before it becomes entirely feasible.

- a line that shows where your cursor is hovering over with the time tooltipped or something like that, it's all approximate right now

This is a great idea, and I'll put it on my list.

- i never liked the term permalink. i think just link works better. but this is just my personal opinion.

Duly noted. I'm in agreement with you.

- Good start though! Good luck.

Thanks for you consideration and help!

Edit: my formatting didn't go as expected

I have a middle of the road solution, what if the site had a feature where you could paste multiple unique "thesetimes" URLs and it would show you a resultant figure with only the overlapped areas?

Although this is definitely a solution, the usage case I detailed in my original post seems much more likely (at least to me). I see your idea useful in the case that many of your groups/circles of friends use it and you just make one for the week and send it out to anyone who wants to organize an event. Whatever you end up doing though, just think about the most common usage cases and how to best implement to suit those cases.

I've got this in the list of things to do. It might be the next thing I do, depending on more feedback.

Whoa, this is exactly an idea I had for Timeslot, the day planner app I posted on HN yesterday. Nice job, you beat me to it :)

It's a good idea, and this is a great start. Things that would make this invaluable:

- The ability to combine multiple schedules together to find free time overlaps (so that, for example, three people can find a good time to meet during the week)

- User accounts, so users can search for their friends by name and schedule meet ups

- Ability to extend before 6am and past 9pm at the click of a button

I was actually planning to build something like this for a different purpose. I am a freelancer and wanted to use it to tell other people "when I am online". The app would basically do the same, but convert the timezones properly to the users timezone. So, if anyone asks me when I am online I could just give them a link and they would be able to see the times localized to their timezones.

Building a timezone friendly version is something I hadn't considered, but I like this idea. Embracing internationalization is most often beneficial. This functionality is something that I could see implementing.

I'm sure you are working towards a competing product but just in case you aren't google apps calendar can share a schedule minus the details and as an admin (of apps) I can click on each employees calendar and overlay each calendar so I can quickly see an exact time.

- I agree with others though that being able to create a user account is a must (from there if I have a repeating schedule I could copy my times from last week for example).

- And for an admin being able to easily overlay all of the calendars is a must.

Lastly I read as a last resort, as I suspect of others, so I would give some visual indicator that you have to drag as I didn't immediately get it. Lastly

This is actually what I use Tungle.me for (especially since it syncs with Google Calendar), but if RIM kills it you might have a golden opportunity :)

Some tags/different colours would be cool. Also there's a bit of a mouse bug if you click on one column, drag, then reclick on another in the same sort of motion (you get two columns/days drawing at the same time).

Would be useful to have some borders or something too (I had no idea where to click or what I was dragging first go).

Nevertheless, conceptually it's sound.

I agree with the tags/colors suggestion.

For example, I am in the office all week, except tuesdays, when I'm available by conference call.

Cool app, I like how you're doing one very simple thing in an easy to understand way.

I've found a bug: when I set a load of times on the calendar then click the "permalink" link it sometimes loses the last few times I set. I guess it takes a moment to sync and get a new permalink or something.

My feature request is to bind touch swipe events. I tried this from my ipad and it didn't work. I know jQuery mobile ships with a swipe event - http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a4.1/#docs/api/events.html

I understand that the mouse events it uses have no context for mobile users, and I'm planning to fix this. Thanks for your suggestion with jQuery Mobile.

I would really enjoy:

* Syncing with google calendar

* being able to add tags, and/or labels.

* different colors.

However I do like the simplicity of it all.

Simplicity is the key. Tags and labels may make it heavy and overwhelming. Syncing with Google Calendar sounds promising, but I like the idea of exporting to .ics so that it would cover more applications. (though I do love GoogleCal)

I've also considered the different colors idea, and this might be implemented if I decide to build something like a comparator of schedules.

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

Definitely colours.

Work != play and it's nice to see the difference at a glance.

Would be cool to put some sort of label on time sections. Editable ones that is.

It looks exactly like WhenIsGood. Am I missing something?

a cool feature for this would be if you could send an email to update it. pretty cool though.

It needs some functionality to be able to edit it from a distance and, more importantly, without a mouse. This could be a good way to achieve that.

Just a suggestion, you might want to register your new project with http://projectilo.com to get continued feedback from other developers

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