PanelCalendarImprovements

Summary

It should be possible to access dialogs for adding and editing tasks and appointments directly from the applet.

Rationale

The Calendar applet sits in a very prominent position on the default Ubuntu desktop - the top right corner. And it is a very useful applet, as it shows important information from Evolution quickly, without having an extra window open and with a clear and simple UI. Users who have learned to use this will try to also use it for adding new entries, because viewing and editing/adding often go hand in hand. Currently, the applet is not well suited for this: You have to open Evolution to do anything and you can't use the panel to get to the To-Do list view of Evolution. Improving the functionality here will make the applet much better suited for everyday use, and should make it easier for new users to discover the power of this applet.

Use cases

Britta gets a phone call asking for a meeting reschedule to an hour later. She takes a quick look at the calendar at the top right of the screen, and finds out that this is possible for her. She now wants to move the meeting to an hour later, but even though she can see and even select the entry in the applet, she can't do anything with it. She now has to open Evolution, search for the correct day, and then select the meeting from all the entries there again.

Gunnar likes to keep task lists for everything he should do. Traditionally, he has kept these on paper, because they are so easily accessible and a new note can be added in moments, when in a phone call or when remembering something on the way out of the office. Gunnar would like to keep his task lists in his computer instead, and if possible share them among several computers, but it must be as quick, accessible and easy as his old pen and paper, or he just knows it will not happen.

Scope

Design

Adding and editing can be done in different ways; for example "Add Task" and "Add Appointment" buttons could be included, and double-clicking an entry would open the edit dialog; these buttons could be reduced to "Add" and placed beside the labels for tasks and meetings, respectively. Or adding and editing could be put into a context menu for the calendar, this would be less discoverable, but reduce the number of visible UI elements.

It is not yet clear to me whether this should open the dialogs from evolution, or new, more streamlined dialogs; with the simplicity of the panel I think new dialogs might be a good idea. Since this method is best for quick entries, it's debatable whether the full dialog is needed. For tasks the new dialog could be just a text entry field for the summary, for meetings just start time, end time and the summary. Using the same dialogs would however be consistent with how things work in Evolution.

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

- Some bugs are already filed that are similar to parts of this specification: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318549, http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162305 and http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154104

Note: Parts of this specification were taken from the UsabilityWishlist

BoF agenda and discussion


CategorySpec

PanelCalendarImprovements (last edited 2008-08-06 16:27:07 by localhost)