Brainstorm

"Odd" Recurrences for calendar application

Posted on 2009-12-07 11:06 UTC by Ralph Angenendt. Status: Under consideration, Categories: Desktop.

Many people have appointments which aren't on a weekly or monthly "repeat order", but occur on some more "odd" dates like "every second wednesday" (bi-weekly), "every second month" (bi-monthly) or even on "every second monday of the month". At the moment the calendar app only supports daily, weekly, monthly and yearly recurrences of events, which isn't advanced enough for most people's scheduling. This brainstorm tries to address bugs 6505, 5954 and 5955.

 

The calendar on the N900 is a really neat  app, but lets make it shine!

Discussion is at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=36161

Solutions for this brainstorm

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Solution #1: Just add bi- and tri-(weekly,monthly,yearly) events

Posted on 2009-12-07 11:09 UTC by Ralph Angenendt.

This seems to be the easiest solution: Just give the user a possibility to enter after how many days, weeks, months or years an event repeats. This could be done via one of the "scroll wheel".


As an example: Choose "weekly" for the repeat mode and let the user select a number then from 1 (which should be default) to 4 (Events every four weeks aren't on a monthly border necessarily). This would leave out events which repeat every 5, 6, 7 or even 13 weeks, so you could alwys have a "scrollwheel" for the complete 52 weeks cycle of a year, making it only 4 numbers to chose from seems to make it easier though.


Same goes for monthly events, there the user should be able to choose from 1 (default) to 12 months.


No idea if this needs to be done for more than yearly events to, but maybe people want to keep trace of events happening on February 29th.

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Solution #2: Also add "every first monday of ..." recurrences

Posted on 2009-12-07 11:22 UTC by Ralph Angenendt.

Some event recurrences cannot be modeled with having (bi/tri)weekly events. There are some events which happen on every first monday of each month or every first monday of august as a yearly event.


This probably is an advanced solution which should only be implemented after Solution 1 has been implemented which deals with the more common recurrences which cannot be modeled with the current calendar implementation. I am not sure how the GUI for choosing events like these could look like. Maybe like this (see it like drop down menus ...):

Every first monday of month
second tuesday january
third [...] [...]
[...] month december
twelveth year

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Solution #3: Enable users to pick day of weekly repeat

Posted on 2009-12-07 11:24 UTC by Ralph Angenendt.

The calendar should have an option to select which days a weekly event repeats.

Such as weekly repeat on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Calendar should provide a day picker so the user can select on which days the event will repeat.

This is from bug 5955. This can be modeled with the current implementation of the calendar by first choosing the first date an event happens at and then choosing "weekly" recurrences.

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Solution #4: Implement solutions one *and* two.

Posted on 2009-12-07 11:28 UTC by Ralph Angenendt.

Try to implement both solutions to make the calendar "carrier grade". Maybe even add solution Nr. 3. The calendar(s) on Palm OS have shown what a mobile calendar is able to do. While the Calendar in maemo 5 is a rather good mobile implementation, it could really shine ...

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Solution #5: Allow the user to edit recurring events

Posted on 2009-12-07 13:36 UTC by Antti Pajula.

Currently there is no way for the user to create exceptions to recurring events.

Let the user create exceptions to the recurring events, similarily as it is done on other Nokia smartphones - the user creates an event, makes it recurring and when plans change, s/he can edit the event to have an exception on a single occation, or the whole recurring event. The exception can be a leap week in a weekly repeating event and so on.

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Solution #6: Let the user select the days

Posted on 2009-12-07 13:40 UTC by Antti Pajula.

When creating an event, and when the user wants it to repeat/recur, present a month-view and let the user select/mark the days where the event should take place. The event would the be present at the same time on the specified days.
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Solution #8: Adding a quarter year overview to Calendar

Posted on 2009-12-31 11:13 UTC by peter kral.

It would be very helpful to include a 3-month overview into the Calendar application. When I am managing my shedules for more months in advance, the overview is low, because I see always only one month. The display of N900 is big enough to display 3 months at the same time and for the user is much convenient this overview. After, with a tap on the selected month, the Calendar switches back to the monthly view.
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Solution #9: Support everything definied by iCalendar

Posted on 2010-03-02 02:21 UTC by Ian Cullinan.

The Maemo calendar app should support everything defined in the iCalendar spec (see Wikipedia and the RFC). This doesn't necessarily mean a UI to create every possible type of event allowed by iCalendar (I don't really need to create events that repeat every 2 seconds), but to enable to possiblity of proper syncing support (e.g. with Google Calendar, something a lot of people want).

At the very least, the calendar backend should have a representation for every type of event possible in iCalendar (I believe this is already the case) and the app should at least be capable of displaying, editing and deleting any such events, with proper handling of exceptions (i.e. "Do you want to edit/delete this occurence or the entire series?").

That said, the UI should be able to support creating arbitary recurrences (perhaps as an "advanced" option in addition to the current options) in two forms:

  • every N days/weeks/months/years
  • the Nth day of every week/month/year

The UI should also be able to list all the exceptions to a recurrence and allow you to remove exceptions (i.e. restore an occurence you've "deleted" from a series).

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