37Signals Launches Hey Calendar | Hacker News Reader

37Signals Launches Hey Calendar

hey.com

52 pointsskadamat24 comments

So I actually think there's a lot of interesting ideas here.

- Love the idea of a continuous timeline view in the "day" view. Not sure how I feel about the horizontal scrolling. Mostly I dislike the vertical-oriented text, but maybe I'd get used to it.

- Love the daily habit tracking built right in.

- Love the "some time this week" feature.

- I like the "maybe" calendar.

I dropped my @hey email address after a year because I quickly learned that having a built-in Calendar was a non-negotiable must-have for me (it turns out that most of my personal emailing is about coordinating events...ha!) I might fire it back up for a year to give it another go now that they have a more native calendar integration.

The design language is very much 37 Signals/Basecamp/Hey. You'll either love it or hate it.

The vertical text is the only thing I'm really struggling with. It's unreadable to me.

Yeah, I think it's the wrong choice.

It's really off-putting because the words are the wrong way. There's a reason books on a bookshelf consistently have the words reading down. That's what I expect to see.

But if you do it right from that perspective, it's wrong with respect to the "timeline" (that is, if you mentally "turn your head" so you're reading right-to-left, you now read "up" the timeline), so that's bad too.

The fact that both choices are wrong are a strong signal they're on to the wrong premise.

I switched over to using it for my day to day just to check it out and I really like all of these things * a lot *.

I also like simple time tracking that displays tracked time as a bar on the border of your day or week view.

I think it's pretty nice as a personal calendar. For getting through my days and weeks, I was previously using Google Calendar + Microsoft To Do. I like this a lot more. I hope they do something better with the vertical text and make the habits more flexible.

Will there ever be a decent calendar app or service that can account for all the significant formats / interop with gCal, iCal and Outlook? I vaguely recall being delighted with an app called "Sunrise" which spanned at least 2 of those, before it was acquired and (that use case, at least) destroyed.

Fantastical on Mac has been my go-to for the last 5 years at least for multiple calendars from multiple providers. Walks the fine line of keeping each separate enough but also combining events when they are exactly the same on two calendars etc.

Cool, thanks, will take a look

If I recall correctly Sunrise got acquired by Microsoft and turned into the foundation of today's Outlook app...

None of the features grab me. It feels more like the output of a 3-day corporate summit to build a product roadmap than anything that actually addresses my core frustrations with how calendars work.

"What if.. hear me out on this, guys.. what if we made the timeline horizontal instead of vertical?"

This looks interesting, and I'd like to play with it for sure. I bought into Hey early to get my email address, but didn't convert, and kept most of my email on Google.

This would be enough to bring me back to Hey I think, but only if they get interoperability right. I've tried calendars other than Google Calendar before, but when I have to interoperate with Google users (invites come my way) it's always hell. Me accepting their invite ends up with an email to their address with a .ics file, rather than actually updating a status in Google Calendar.

I think something like Fantastical (which pulls in all my calendars from different places) will probably remain my daily driver until someone does this better. Now I just wish they had an Android app.

I really liked the features of hey.com but I just couldn't stand their design language something about the colors and weighting of elements is just totally off-putting for me and the calendar sadly isn't better.

This is what I like most about all 37 Signals products.

The fact that they are so polarizing with just design choices is their edge.

You either love it or hate. It’s a lot like Rails in this regard.

Agreed.

The amount of colors, bold and flashy text, etc. is just very distracting.

When you're dealing with lots of information, as you do with large email inboxes - I want the opposite of distracting.

I want something where it puts content first, no distractions, and high info-density.

Hey is not that.

I was a big fan of https://www.yourtempo.co before they shutdown.

Slightly Off-Topic.

I dont have Hey email so I cant test their Calendar. But I am wondering if it is built just the same using Turbo, without being a full SPA.

Yes, it uses Turbo and Stimulus and sends the calendar as HTML. All their JS modules are viewable in view source because they use bare imports. Neat.

I remember in the very early 00s, the debate about MPA and SPA, suggesting you can only do Email with MPA, but Calendar cant be done.

That video feels very anti-37signals style.

When past videos were just either Jason or DHH, giving an authentic - unscripted recorded demo.

Here's a 23 minute uncut demo that Jason recorded/shared last week: https://youtu.be/SztU4232u_o?si=D_6iXJLbtdVhV7Ol

The ever excellent Maggie Appleton covered Speculative Calendar Events (trying to find a time) recently & Hey got a shout-out for their maybe events. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38940275 https://maggieappleton.com/speculative-events

IMO calendar is a table-stakes feature for modern email services, they’re way too late on this. I tried Hey when it was new, but moved to Fastmail because of no calendar, and haven’t looked back. All I want is something that works when people send me invites, not trying to revolutionize the way I look at the calendar.

alright. landing page looks great. apple drama was unfortunate but got resolved.

i'd like the HN take on the downsides that they are maybe not being upfront about?

Hey Email was notably a one way deal, you could import mail but you couldn't export it (something to do with the file formats? idk). whats the catch with Hey Calendar? does it mirror my gcal well so that i can leave if i want?

i did try Hey in the early days, but ultimately the slowness of the app turned me back to Superhuman.

Pretty much same catch as the mail, its one way. You use their client (or I guess reverse-engineer their API's) and that's it.

iCloud calendar integration is read-only (because it is a read-only subscription and not actually authenticating or anything).

It also doesn't solve any of the problems I have with calendars... mainly that I have to manage multiple where I'd like to have events be synced (to varying degree) across them.

It also introduces new problems... that I can't use my preferred calendar client which has features that Hey does not that I use all the time (such as hiding events).

"to varying degrees"

Very much agree with this.

I kind of crave some kind of configurable advanced workflow around calendar categorization, membership, visibility, etc. For example, I want to accept a prompt to create a calendar event from a doctor's office reminder, and I want that shared with certain personal contacts (my spouse) but I want it to show up as "busy" in my work calendar--without my work calendar service knowing the details. I want to be prompted to provide a travel time buffer around it so I don't get scheduled for a meeting before and after my event; when the time comes, I want to be notified about the personal calendar entry but not by the work calendar.

This is one example but I feel like these calendar-juggling operations are actually pretty common use-cases these days, besides integrating between iCloud/Gcal calendar users and "arbitrary calendars" like Yahoo or some other calendar thing. Co-parenting with an ex-spouse brought up a whole bunch of other "sync to some degree but not naïvely" use-cases, too. And there's professional use-cases where I'm setting up job search interviews and need to block time on my work calendar(s) but not reveal details.

> apple drama was unfortunate but got resolved.

Was it unfortunate? I think it was absolutely amazing marketing wise. And considering that they got briefly rejected for the exact same reason like last time...

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