Redesigning the Desktop Calendar
Most people use a calendar of one form or another in their day to day lives. With so many people using calendars I am really surprised that nobody has gotten annoyed by their functionality to the point where they felt that they needed to rewrite the way calendars work. Maybe I am alone on this idea but stay with me.
It seems to me that the computer calendar was simply a copy of the old paper calendar. The ones that hang on the wall in your cubical with the last month still in view because you never look at the thing except when you finally remember to flip the thing to the next month. Yeah that one.
It seems to me that when designing the desktop calendar programmers took the tried and true route. They built the calendar to look just like our old trusty friend the paper calendar. Granted they gave us more views like week view, day view, and even year view. But I think their needs to be one more view. "Rolling Month View"
Rolling Month View is for people who like the birds eye view of the month, but also want to see the next three or four weeks in addition to the current week. The problem with the traditional calendar system is that if I am at the end of the current month I have to click over to the next calendar month to see what's going on in two weeks. flipping back and forth counting days, trying not to count those extra days that are dimmed out but added in there to complete the boxes in the grid.
I just want to see what's happening in the next week or two. I never care about what happened last week unless the police are asking me "Where were you on the night of…" Anyway, you get the point.
Below is a screen shot of my calendar for the month of May. Assuming today was the 25th of May, it is nearing the end of the month. Granted I can see a few days ahead, but what if I want to see what's happening the week after? I have to toggle to the next month. Meanwhile the calendar is happy to show me what I did 4 weeks ago. What a waste of space! And totally useless in my opinion.
Rolling Month View might be the solution. It continues to roll the calendar forward a week at a time so you always have the next two or three weeks ahead of you displayed in the familiar monthly grid view.
Here is a very rough screenshot for conceptual purposes. There is probably a nicer way to do the rolling calendar, but this took me all of 1 minute to put together. The point is, it makes sense even if the presentation needs some work.
If your a developer for Apple, or know a developer for Apple, can you please get this worked into the next version of iCal? I will love you long time.
Tags: Design · Opinions & Rants · Software · usability
3 comments so far ↓
http://fusiongrokker.com/assets/content/rolling-month.png
And you can do pretty much any (reasonable) range, so 1-n weeks. Just select them in the small view at the top left of the window.
If I understand you correctly. What outlook has is not an automatic view per se but, one that you can manually select a date range from.
If you find yourself manually setting up a view like this often enough, then it would seem that this type of view should be built in to the program, and automatic.
To my knowledge iCal has nothing like this at all, so we are in need of it big time.
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