The future of GNOME Calendar

Today, the Calendar Team had the first meeting in history. Isaque, Lapo, Renata, Vamsi and I attended it, and the meeting was extremely productive! In fact, we were able to sketch out the general direction that GNOME Calendar will head towards.

What’ll be added

Lets start talking about the additions that Calendar will have.

A New Sidebar

Our design samurai came up with this idea and it was immediately completely welcomed. We want to do a simpler, less cluttered version of this:

https://dncnhi2ob6sh.cloudfront.net/img/fantastical2-mac-screenshot-dark.png

 

The search would behave just like the redesigned GNOME Control Center, and in fact, using a sidebar fixes many issues we currently have with GNOME Calendar, like the search popover and random glitches all around.

The sidebar will be able to be hidden, just like Nautius’ sidebar, so people can have their old Calendar again, behaving just like it used to behave. Stay tuned.

Week View

Vamsi has been working on Week View for the past few months. It’s harder than it looks like! Still, he’s working on it and we plan to have the week view by the end of this year. The current state is described by him in his blog post, and here’s how it actually looks like (be aware – IT’S NOT FINISHED):

https://pandusonu.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/daysgrid2.png?w=660

 

There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’ll get there eventually 🙂

Attendees

This is something I myself use frequently, but cannot do with Calendar. Obviously, this will be integrated with GNOME Contacts and will support mailing the attendees.

 

What’ll change

There are some pain points that we want to change in GNOME Calendar. Thanks to Renata, we have a much clearer picture about the big bottlenecks of Calendar now: adding new calendars and promoting Online Accounts.

Calendar Management Workflow

Based on Renata’s usability testing results, we’ll improve the way people manage calendars by changing its workflow. We’ll use this oportunity to finally implement the initial setup wizard, which we have mockups for quite some time now:

calendar-wizard

We’ll also turn the calendar management dialog into a wizard-like dialog, and make it more pleasant to work with.

Year View

The current Year View is not in the greatest shape possible. The single biggest issue right now is that the months in Year view are different from the months in Calendar (and GNOME Shell):

month-differences

Fortunately, Isaque has a deep understanding of the Year view, and we’ll turn Year view into a GtkFlowBox-based widget, and share the same month widget (and behavior) all around. Exciting times ahead!

What’ll be removed

Nothing (just a bait for the trolls :P)

Conclusion

Of course, I didn’t cover every single thing discussed in the meeting. Obvious things like recurrences, more reminders, natural language support, jump to date and many other things are not worth the time – they’ll be added. Period.

In general, I’m very happy that this meeting happened. There is a team of contributors growing around Calendar, and this is awsome! Remember that the very first post in this blog was about the Calendar revival? It was a long way from a dead app to a serious core project. A big thanks for this awsome team that is putting time and efforts to make Calendar a better application – without you guys, there wouldn’t be a Calendar!

Excited? Join us in making Calendar great. Get involved, ping us on #gnome-calendar IRC channel, file bugs and/or document it. Every contribution is endlessly appreciated 🙂

Peace!

 


17 responses to “The future of GNOME Calendar”

  1. Hello,
    Good news and good work. 😉
    So, do you plan to add dark theme support? It is, I think, my only GNOME app which still in white theme. It’s bad for my eyes and system integration. 😉

    Thanks.

    1. I’m not sure what “support” is needed. Rather, they just need to stop overriding the user’s theme choices. It would be great if they would do so.

      1. See this code, which forces off any local preference for a dark theme:
        https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-calendar/tree/src/gcal-application.c#n249

        My guess is this was put in at one time because local theme elements did not mesh well with the dark variant, but surely this should be accommodated.

    2. folks should add their voices of support/concern to the bugzilla ticket for this:

      https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758057

      1. Lapo Calamandrei Avatar
        Lapo Calamandrei

        Please don’t and generally don’t comment on bugs for “voting” purpose. Bugzilla is a technical issue tracker, if you have to add something interesting, like some technical issue or a use case not taken into consideration go ahaed, but otherwise don’t. A bug report with a lot of comments requires people to read all of them, so taking quite a bit of time, generally decreasing the possibilities for the bug to get fixed.

  2. This looks generally very good to me. I just have two suggestions:

    In the welcome-screen, if the user wants to keep the calendar on its device he has to put a mark in a checkbox. This is bit confusing as it suggests that the checkbox somewhat relates to the above selections. The text for the checkbox begins by saying “or…”, but it still makes you think twice on what it actually do (like, can you do multiple selections / is it a confirmation of some terms?). I therefore believe it would be better if it had the same styling as the above selections and was contained in the same list, maybe with a icon of a house would be applicable?
    In the pictures under “Year View” I can’t see any weeknumbers displayed. Is that something the user can enable, or if not – a option we can have? I think most people see no use for weeknumbers at all, but some users find it very useful to have.

  3. Will this mean proper CalDAV support will come to GNOME?

  4. Darrell Avatar

    Please consider adding a multi-week view (a variant of month view) where the user can define the number of weeks before and after the current week.

  5. Michael Catanzaro Avatar
    Michael Catanzaro

    Note that in the mockup “login” (noun) should be replaced with “log in” (verb)

  6. You ought to be a part of a contest for one of the finest blogs on the web.
    I am going to recommend this site!

  7. It sounds wonderful!
    Is it a way ton install the newest version on Gnome 3.18 ?
    My very best
    D.

    1. GNOME Calendar 3.22 depends on GNOME 3.22 features, so I don’t think you’ll be able to fetch the latest version without updating your desktop environment.

      1. Ok, great ! Thank you so much for the great great work!

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