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Comment by davidy123 | Hacker News Reader

Please do. I can't believe basically every calendar app quantizes things to "months," with a disruptive jump from one to the next, which is just annoying when you want to access time as a day by day, week by week thing. We could get rid of "months," using week number instead for example, and it would not really matter, but we're all forced to that paradigm.

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I've been thinking about creating a budgeting app that finally does away with months. I hate setting a budget for a month and would instead love to do a 30 rolling window.

Please do it and tell me about it.

This is a great idea. It would be really useful if you could just put in income and expenses with dates attached, and have the app compute things in windows of various sizes, as well as traditional calendar-based periods.

You can use ledger (https://ledger-cli.org/) for that:

  ledger bal <filters> -f <journal file> -b "28 days ago"

—> 28 day rolling window

This was the logic Brex started with when they first introduced their corporate cards.

The rolling window started wrecking havoc very quickly. For instance, we gave all employees $300/month budget for parking garage. However, on some months they would charge the card on 5th of the month, on another at 11th, etc. It was literally unusable and we left for another provider (later Brex also went back to calendar days).

While this might not be an issue for your application per se, the real world operates on calendar days. You will quickly run into situations where 30 day rolling window not only doesn’t work but is explicitly causing problems.

My 2 cents.

Honestly weeks feel more relevant than months for day-to-day life. Source: my four-year-old understands weeks (because she can see the difference between weekdays when she has school and weekends when she does not) but not months.

It's unfortunate as a society we don't punctuate our months with something as simple as an extended 4 day break.

Its probably way too late to implement something like this but the idea is still a good one.

Thinking of it, wasn't there a "metric" calendar or something that sort of did this?

The French Republican Calendar had five/six complementary days [0] at the end of the year that were part of no particular month. They were, however, spent contiguously between summer and fall, rather than between each season.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Com...

I think it would be better for everyone to get four days a month to choose as days off. Then it would be better distributed. I would prefer this to a four work week. After a few days in a row the freedom really sinks in, so I'd love to be able to take a week off every month, guilt free.

I really like the Fastmail calendar because it has months on a giant scroll, so one leads seamlessly into the next. It works quite well for me because I really think on a "weeks" basis but knowing the month is still important.

Thunderbird also has a calendar view like this called Multiweek, though I do like Fastmail's smoother scrolling.

Not in the week view, which makes it super annoying - I often want to move/copy events from one week to the next, and I can't do it through drag and drop, because (like almost every webapp out there) Fastmail app doesn't understand interactions like "scroll by one day only" and "if I drag to the edge of the canvas, it means I want you to scroll it".

Month view, yes, has this nice continuity you mentioned. It also has a ... I can't pin exactly what's wrong, but I almost always get confused which month I'm looking at, because the month name label above the calendar seems to often be off by one month relative to what month is visible on the screen. But the bigger issue is, of course, that in a monthly view, you can hardly fit any useful amount of events.

At first I thought when he said a “different” calendar app, it would be something perhaps that didn’t measure and record events in standard units of time, but perhaps I guess that is too different to be useful for most people.

>too different to be useful for most people

So is what he's talking about. You just don't realize it until you try to implement it.

Some things are the way they are for arbitrary reasons. Most things timekeeping have a pretty good reason for how they came to be.

But then again I argue the same thing for US system of measurements vs metric, as well.

You'd still have a disruptive jump between weeks.

Yes, but those are "real". Most peoples' life patterns are actually altered by week and weekend boundaries. Mar 1 this year fell mid-week on a Wednesday. It made no difference to most lives except that it made everyone's calendar ugly with duplicated / grey-ed out days at the end of a February calendar and the start of a March calendar.

By the way, why don't we switch to a 8-day week. I.e., 5 working days + 3 weekend days?

Technological progress should have made this possible by now, I suppose. More spare time for side-projects :) Let's call the 8th day "Funday".

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