It looks nice, the idea is appealing, but the result is awful. This thing is totally unusable. You need to remember to slide the frame every month. It doesn't even tell you that you did or not. Sliding the frame requires checking the number of days there are in the month. When you're in the last week, having the 31 always there is a pain in the ass. Knowing the next month is kind of useful.
>You need to remember to slide the frame every month
And if you have a wall calendar you have to remember to tear down the page of the previous month every month...
also the entire point of a wall calendar is that you can make notes on specific days, isn't it?
Which is still doable for this design, provided the backing is a whiteboard.
It’s not for me either as I see no value in a physical calendar, but I’d imagine the people who do see that value are the same type of people who are aware that June has … let me just pull out my phone real quick… 30 days.
Please straight up ask ten people, even if your circles are on average highly educated, and see how many know an arbitrary month (not significant ones like February, or December where the 31st is new year's) without having to think about it or count knuckles. Asking about the current or an adjacent month might also be something they remember from recently seeing calendars that tell you this information.
I think it's very uncommon to have this memorized to the point where using a calendar that doesn't tell you is as easy as using one that does.
I think this might be a cultural thing. A friend of mine from Taiwan was perplexed I didn't have this memorized, my reaction was the same as yours.
What's wrong with counting on knuckles? You adjust your calendar with this contraption once per month.
And yet it's true. It would take me a lot of thinking to answer how many days are in an arbitrary month. And I'd probably only be 80% confident. I truly don't understand how I don't know this either. But I've never made an effort to learn it, nor has it been a problem.
Doing the knuckle dance every time you glance at it, to know whether to change the month already, seems annoying. (Yeah you'd memorize it for that month after a bit, but still you have to pay attention.)
Why is this constraint necessary? If you can even so much as think about it or count knuckles (let alone that you happen to have memorized the number of days per month), then this calendar is useful.
Doing the knuckle dance every time you glance at it, to know whether to change the month already, seems annoying. (Yeah you'd memorize it for that month after a bit, but still you have to pay attention.)
There's an English jingle that I was taught (1970s), and my child also:
Thirty days hath September, April, June and November.
All the rest have thirty one, save February alone
Which has twenty eight days clear, and twenty nine each leap year.
(edit: in Australia, for reference)
Unless you work closely with dates, asking somebody "how many days in April" will result in a calendar check, a song or a them doing something odd with their knuckles.
But yeah, the point still stands. Having a calendar actively has wrong number of days is very misleading and counterproductive even if one knows how many there are supposed to be. Not to mention it doesn't even have month shown.
But for the other months I sing the song. Takes about ten seconds, required monthly at most. I think this is pretty common.
I personally just remember the cutoff point (7/8), and before that odd months have 31, after it even months have 31 days. It eventually became "muscle" memory.