GNOME Calendar 3.19.90 was released

Aye folks! This was a very productive cycle for GNOME Calendar, and this release is the result of a hardworked cycle. First of all, the bad news: no DnD support, no Week View, no, no, no!

But why, Mr. Feaneron?

The reason is simple. Sanity.

Behind the scenes

GNOME Calendar is build on top of Evolution-Data-Server, so we don’t need to write an entirely new backend and to guarantee system integration (GNOME Shell uses it to fetch events, for example).

The problem is that EDS is an “[…] unholy mess“, and it reflects on Calendar. No matter how skilled are the engineers behind it, Calendar was reaching a point of messy code. No one likes messy code – it makes newcomers run away, maintainers avoid improvements out of fear of breaking the app, the app dies, no one’s happy.

So I decided to not let it reach this point, and did a major rework and cleanup of Calendar internals. Believe me, it wasn’t easy.

The good thing is that we’ll be able to avoid commits like this and this, and after reworking the internals, fixing long-term, hard bugs was a piece of cake. From now on, Calendar is going the right way (IMHO) and we’ll avoid messy code and obscure paths.

Now, let’s go to the cool things.

An Improved Quick Add Popover

Following the recent trend of “Popovers Everywhere! TM”, the quick add popover just got better. Now, the user can select in which calendar the event will be added without having exit the popover. Long-term plans include adding natural language support, so we’ll be able to extract the location, start & end dates from the event summary.

Captura de tela de 2016-02-16 22-22-10
The new quick add popover

 

Implementing this popover was a delight after the new rework.

Year View, Restyled

Thanks to the new contributor Isaque Galdino, the year view receive some improvements that made it look so much better! And appearently, he won’t stop soon. Check this out:

Captura de tela de 2016-02-16 22-21-45
The improved year view (check the dots under the days)

 

Thanks, Isaque! I hope you keep up with your really good work.

Keyboard Shortcuts Window

Last but not least, the brand new shortcuts window:

Captura de tela de 2016-02-16 22-21-29
Most people didn’t know Calendar had so many shortcuts!

And, as the tradition dictates, a cool video of the new version:

 

A Public Request

Since Calendar received such a major overhaul in it’s gears, I need to make sure it is stable and good enought. So I hereby request that, whoever has the chance, please test Calendar. Thanks!

Any ideas, comments or suggestions? Leave a comment below!


17 responses to “GNOME Calendar 3.19.90 was released”

  1. Hello … great news !!
    I have a request. I love gnome-calendars and prefer it over other alternatives, but it lacks a feature widely used in my environment is to print the calendar.

    Often we use specific calendars (roadmaps, holidays, etc.) to bring them into the office. It would be very good.

    Cheers

  2. Crazy idea:
    Attach voice notes to calendar events (through gnome-sound-recorder) or directly. A modern feature of this style is necessary.

    Voice memos are common today, and we can transfer that we use in Whatsapp or Telegram to the PC and save time by creating an event or task… so, crazy idea.

    Cheers

  3. Did you ever considered the opportunity to use Tracker as a storage backend, such as Gnome News – https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-news/ – already does with feeds?
    Sharing calendar informations through a common, semantic interface would have large benefits to the whole Gnome platform. The “calendar” ontology is already included in the base Tracker’s installation.

    1. Tracker versus EDS is a long debate that can be traced back to Nokia/Intel MeeGo days. Ultimately, in my opinion, EDS, with all its flaws, is still more mature for this sort of thing than Tracker. Also, we are not doing a lot of cross-domain activity, which would have been a plus in favour of Tracker.

  4. It’s nice to see a better code architecture! If developers don’t follow some best-practices, the codebase can become messy. Personally I’ve learned a lot by reading the book Object-Oriented Design Heuristics, it contains lots of (discussed in great detail) guidelines for OO design. If you have not already read such a book, I recommend that one. It’s old (middle 90’s) but very good and still highly relevant for OOP.

    Yes, writing readable, maintainable, clean code takes more time, but it pays off in the long run. You have a more stable software (if there is also a good testsuite), and the software has more chances to survive a long time. On the other hand if you keep adding new and more experimental features like crazy, the risk is that the software becomes unmaintainable, with too many bugs, and at some point nobody wants to work on the codebase anymore (cough some app in gnome that I won’t mention cough).

  5. /me cheers feaneron from the sidelines

    1. Alexander C. Avatar
      Alexander C.

      Really missing desktop notifications few minutes before event.

  6. […] GNOME Calendar 3.19.90 was released […]

  7. forteller Avatar

    Looks great! Will it be possible to update to this version in Ubuntu Gnome 15.10? Thanks!

    1. I don’t think so. It depends on latest Gtk+ (at least 3.19.3) to work.

  8. Great work, keep up, it’s good to see GNOME moving forward.

    1. What is good is to see you around! GNOME misses you, Erick!

  9. corebots Avatar
    corebots

    still missing a big feature – the ability to set an alert for events. otherwise great work, thanks!

  10. […] go ahead and check out the new hotness in Documents, Maps (it is awesome), Nautilus (or Files), Calendar and […]

  11. Aurelien1402 Avatar
    Aurelien1402

    Hi,
    The application is great. I use il with my owncloud account calendars. I only have a problem with one big calendar witch loads only partially. I don’t know why… But I can add events. Everything Works with android and owncloud so I think it’s an issue with gnome calendar.

  12. Hi!
    I just upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 to find the calendar by default in the installation.
    It is THE answer to combining my business Google calendar and my personal Owncloud calendar by using the Online Accounts functionality in Gnome.

    Now that I’m using it in a serious fashion, I must say there are some enhancements that could make life a lot easier.

    Usability
    #1 – Configuration options
    There are currently almost no ways to configure the views. Only a calendar settings section which doesn’t fully function (see #4).

    2 – Time selections

    The time selection is to be done by clicking up and down, incrementing 1 minute at the time. When a new entry is created, often it displays something like 28:08, due to the current time. This could be made more user friendly by allowing 10 minute increments by button selection, precise minutes by manual input and a default entry by half hour.

    #3 – Week view
    The most used view is currently not present.

    #4 – Calendar selection
    It is nice to have the possibility to select the right calendar, however even when setting certain calendars to not be displayed; they are shown in the calendar picker nevertheless. Especially when not using the local calendars, they sit there nevertheless, grayed out.

    My advise would also be to look at other implementations of good calendars, e.g. Sunrise from Microsoft or Google Calendar. These are very clean implementations of calendars. That way, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

    Keep up the good work!

  13. I’m scratching my head. How to move an event that was saved in the ‘personal’ calendar to another calendar such as google, bithdays etc? I have noticed it can be easily done in reverse by moving events from other calendars to ‘personal’…

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