
Show HN: New calendar app idea - petermolyneux
http://www.oneviewcalendar.com
======
petermolyneux
Hi all. Just wanted to show you my latest side project (been working on it for
a couple of years now). It's a calendar app with a twist.

It's developed as a web app, thats wy it could be integrated directly on the
landing page. It can also be run on any device directly from
[http://app.oneviewcalendar.com](http://app.oneviewcalendar.com)

Instead of the traditional monthview and day view I have used a timeline that
is zoomable and scrollable. Give it a try, it's quite a different experience.

Please leave me a comment :)

~~~
Kip9000
I like the idea but semantically, this is confusing. If I want to scroll, it
zooms in/out. Even that, it doesn't keep the focus making me wanting to really
scroll. Now I'm really confused how to scroll. (I know how but I'm giving you
the cognitive load that's necessary here). What would be cool is to use zoom
gestures to ....zoom . That is completely intuitive. Aside from that, vertical
bars take too much screen space without adding much information. Perhaps they
could be translucent or some such.

~~~
yuchi
It’s scroll-jacking to let users without a touchpad to zoom in and out. I
expect the mobile/touch version to be way more sensible.

~~~
Kip9000
I know, but users without touchpad had zoom functionality (like ctrl+wheel or
ctrl+scroll) for years. Don't get me wrong I like the zoomability of a
calendar, it is an excellent way to visualise information.

~~~
yuchi
Managing _both_ is very difficult, at least until we get pointer events
supported
([http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer](http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer))

~~~
wuliwong
I'm confused by what is difficult. In this case I would make the UX allow the
native scroll trigger to operate and then add a zoom trigger. If you make the
zoom triggers to be both ctrl+click and two finger pinch then it will work
across all devices (ie. mobile/desktop/touchpad/mouse).

I agree that it will be great to be able to target touch pads or
mouse/keyboards but I believe it is pretty simple to fix the UX on this app.

------
Vilkku
Looks pretty nice. Some criticisms:

* I dislike how the website hijacks scrolling, the phone doesn't fit on a Macbook 13" screen so I tried to scroll down, but that just scrolled in the app

* When scrolling out to a view where I see many months at once it can only show a few events, in the demo it only shows Gym, and when I zoom in a bit more it also shows Hockey with kids. I feel these recurring events should have the lowest priority when zoomed out, it's more important to see "special" one-off events.

* It's not clear that there are events hidden. When zoomed out a lot it's of course expected that this is the case, but when zoomed out a bit more it might be unclear if all events for a time period are visible or not.

~~~
petermolyneux
Hi, thanks for the feedback. Sorry for hijacking the scroll, but it just had
to be done :) Your second point on recurring events is good, I will look at
that. Even more so the last point, that one is really important, but I haven't
found a good way to solve it yet. Thanks /Peter

~~~
danthejam
You could hijack the scroll only when the mouse is over the phone's screen not
the entire page. Very interesting UI!

~~~
timjver
That's already what happens for me. I can scroll the page just fine if my
cursor is off the demo device.

~~~
georgehotelling
In Firefox the scrollwheel is hijacked regardless of where the cursor is.

------
dasil003
There's something existentially terrifying about being able to quickly zoom
out from out from a view of 5 minute intervals to one of several decades.

~~~
bikamonki
Terrifying yet inspiring! Must make the best of such short existence :)

~~~
copperx
I'm not trying to be negative, but I disagree. It's deeply unsettling.

~~~
kome
Respice post te. Hominem te memento.

~~~
annnnd
Translation for us lesser humans: "Look after you [to the time after your
death] and remember you're [only] a man.

------
stared
One point - when compressing the view I care for rare events (e.g. deadlines,
conferences) not things like gym. So I would do the opposite of adding counts.
(The same, when I do something daily and I compress days to a single line, I
DO NOT want to see it.)

~~~
alch-
I second that, recurring events aren't very interesting to me, and they crowd
the view (even when just looking at today / this week). Would be great if they
were somehow less prominent.

Awesome work though, I love it!

------
jere
Nice! I had a very similar idea, which I made a small prototype for in a HCI
course (click on the logo to get test data):
[http://humbit.com/longcal/](http://humbit.com/longcal/)

The vision I had was a horizontal rather than vertical timeline and discrete
rather than continuous zooming (though I thought a lot about implementing
continuous scrolling). Yours might be the better way to do it, at least for
mobile.

In any case, I think existing calendar apps fall short. There's no support for
planning anything that extends out of the current month. The absolute _worst_
is when you're in the last week of the month and you don't even see things
coming up in the next few days. Someone has a birthday and you don't even see
it until it's too late. And what about planning things (trips, 30 day
challenges, contracts) that last weeks or months?

I even think that the shorter perspective affects our ability to do long term
thinking.

~~~
odbol_
This is why I use Google calendar in the special "4 week view". Always shows
the current day at the top so do you only looking at the future.

------
asimuvPR
The demo is really slick. The app does feel better than Google calendar. What
was it built with? :)

------
sharp11
Beautiful UI, very intuitive!

One issue I ran into (on a MacBook Pro, OSX El Cap) was that scrolling
wouldn't work on my (external) trackpad. It interpreted 2-finger scroll as
pinch (down) and zoom (up). Had to use trackball to scroll.

~~~
petermolyneux
Hi, glad you liked it!! On the trackpad scrolling and zooming is done as on
google maps. That is a two finger scroll does zooming and a single finger
pressed and dragged does scrolling.

Hope that helps.

~~~
mcintyre1994
This looks awesome! Would you consider Google maps style mobile zoom too? In
particular their one finger zoom is really great on mobile.

Two typographic things on the recurrence settings: frequence should read
frequency, "week days" is a bit confusing, I'd probably change it to "on these
days"

------
castell
> By Peter Molyneux, Sweden

Peter Molyneux, the designer of Black & White and Fable? Or just the same
name?

------
dheera
My biggest gripe with Google Calendar is the lack of consolidation of
duplicate events. Often I have about 3-4 copies of various events and a storm
of 10+ notifications for every appointment. If you can solve this problem, it
would be a killer app for me.

~~~
fudged71
FYI there is a chrome extension which solves this!

~~~
13hours
Do you have a link? I have many birthday duplicates on my Google Calendar for
example.

~~~
fudged71
Found it: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/event-merge-for-
go...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/event-merge-for-google-
ca/idehaflielbgpaokehlhidbjlehlfcep?hl=en)

------
spditner
Reminds me of the Fisheye Calendar from UMD's HCI Lab, which was doing
experimentation with Zoomable UI's:
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/fisheye.shtml](http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/fisheye.shtml)

------
xavi
Reminds me of DateLens
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/](http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/)

------
WWKong
Beautiful. How do you build something like this? Coding language? Stack? Dev
environment?

~~~
elmigranto
Yes, all of those don't really matter. You just fire up whatever and start
building the damn thing.

~~~
gorkemyurt
well in this case I think it does.. Animating this many DOM elements in a
performant way would be really hard. Looks like the webapp is rendered in a
<canvas/> element. I think its a better discussion than 'which js framework
should I use?'

~~~
petermolyneux
Thanks for your interest. Performance has been har to get good enough.
Basically it is a javascript app on a canvas. Thats why it can be integrated
on the landing page.

~~~
dclowd9901
You seem to have accidentally invented a really slick UI library for canvas. I
have been working off and on on something like that for the last 3 years, but
yours is actually factually working. I really hope you publish it.

------
itaysk
I like the creativity, but I think for daily use I still prefer the table
inspired week view (or 3 day view for portrait mode) as it gives me a better
sense of orientation. For execution you get A+ :) really well executed.

------
petermolyneux
Hi everone, Thanks for all the great feedback. Anyone applying for Beta-
testing will have to wait a few hours. Got my hand full :)

Feel free to use the contact form for any questions or if you just want the
IPhone version.

Cheers, Peter

------
omarforgotpwd
This is a cool demo, but why would someone want to have all these long running
events on the screen at all times? It makes the UI cluttered and less clear
what the next thing is you need to be doing. For example, do I really need the
fact that I'm on vacation to be taking space at the side of the screen at all
times? I'm not going to forget. This kind of design makes it easier for me to
miss things I need to remember to do, perhaps defeating the point of using a
calendar app

~~~
jacalata
I like it, because I have things like "parents in town", "partner in Canada"
or "no soda challenge" that are relevant to any specific decision I make for a
few weeks. Do I really want to see that movie with friends while my parents
are here, or should I keep that evening free? If he's out of town then I won't
plan a date night then.

------
Stenerson
Very clever design, looks great.

A few thoughts on navigation: I'm on a mac and I felt that the zoom using the
"scroll wheel" (i.e. track pad) was pretty disorienting. I was expecting it to
scroll. Having to click and hold down to scroll doesn't feel right.

I also instinctively thought the arrow keys would work but they didn't. I'd
suggest up/down (obvious) and left = zoom out, right = zoom in.

------
dmvaldman
the main view is all rendered in a <canvas> element... wow!

~~~
bschwindHN
Honestly it was probably way easier (and more performant) to implement it that
way. I would hate to wrangle DOM elements and CSS to get it to perform that
smoothly and lay out in an expected and consistent way. I think most game
developers would likely agree.

------
hurbledr
Very cool prototype. Like many in this thread, I've been dreaming of a
calendar app like this, something that I can pick up and use without having to
read a bunch of documentation. It seems like most of the calendar programs
I've tried to use succumbed to feature creep and ended up being feature rich
but unwieldy, so it's refreshing to see such a simple, easy to use program.

That being said, the one feature I could really use in a calendar app is to
have a sort of ledger column that I could use for budgeting. As a person
juggling multiple part-time jobs, it would be invaluable for me to be able to
plug in my expected shifts for the week, get an estimate of how much my
paycheck would be, and calculate that against my bills for the
week/month/year.

------
whatcd
Love the pinch-to-zoom on this touch-screen Chromebook. It reminds me of
Google Photo's!

------
steinsgate
Thanks for making this app. I had a similar idea too, but never executed it.
Of course, the idea was based on a certain need. Often, I would have
unscheduled events such as "talk to Santosh sometime next week" or "go on a
short bike trip with Francesca next month". Basically events that have not
been assigned a defined date and time. These are the events that I would like
to see in the week view or month view (when I zoom out) so that I know that I
need to find a specific time for it. The other events (which have a set date
and time) receive lower priority in the zoomed out views. Have you thought of
implementing something similar? Would be nice.

------
jegutman
I've thought about hacking a calendar app for myself before. My pain points
seemed very different. My main thing was being able to manage recurring events
in a way that wasn't awful. I had a lot of recurring reminders to just take
care of simple things during the week, but then I would go between time zones
and some things would need to be shifted and other things fit an absolute
time. Then I would go on vacation and some things needed to be snoozed on
vacation but others were still important.

I never really found a good solution from this. I just happen to be on
sabbatical from working and have a new kid so my life just doesn't work the
same way.

------
plainOldText
This app looks very similar to Timepage by Moleskin – which has been around
for a while.

------
chris_overseas
This looks very promising, with a few improvements I can easily see this as my
preferred calendar app.

Feedback: Is it possible to selectively enable/disable individual calendars? I
have a "birthday" calendar from a large social network that results in
multiple birthdays each day completely dominating the calendar. If I can't
turn that off, it's virtually unusable for me unfortunately.

I tried to assign up for the Android beta but just received a confirmation
email that I'd subscribed, no link to install the app. Is that to be expected?

[Edit: I just received a download link in an additional email. Thanks!]

~~~
hacksonx
Selecting a calendar allows you to access checkboxes that allow you to
disable/enable subcalenders such as national holidays, birthdays and the main
calendar.

------
cdcarter
Give me a place for my email so you can tell me when it's iOS ready, please!

~~~
petermolyneux
Sorry, I should have done that. For now could you use the contact form? Cheers
Peter

------
kagamine
When you add an event you scroll down, down, down. The final step is OK/Cancel
and they are at the top of the page, centered. I can't reach those buttons
with my thumb and have to use my other hand. They should be down at the bottom
where the flow of the action ends, left and right justified.

Edit. I think it could also benefit from a 'snap to now' button somewhere. I
don't have time to use your fancy GUI for literally seconds of my life to see
what's going on this morning.

Just my 2c. Really nice app. (tu) I hope this doesn't come across as negative,
I just want to help.

------
DigitalJack
Very slick. But something seems wrong with the two finger zoom (or I
misunderstand it). It zooms, but it also scrolls a little... so the thing I
was looking at will go off screen.

For example if I have Sunday the 10th at the top of the screen, and I two
finger scroll/zoom, I'm preplexed why the date at the top shifts to earlier or
later dates. This happens both directions. Maybe it's intentional, but it's
unexpected (for me). I either want to zoom or scroll, not both.

I hope you take that as constructive. I really like it otherwise :)

~~~
petermolyneux
Hi, I will try it out again. The zooming and scrolling should have been done
to perfection, but maybe I've missed something. The two finger zoom is
intended to follow your fingers vertically and ignore any horizontal movement.

------
anotheryou
Looks great, when it supports caldav (or uses the calender of my android which
is synced via caldav by a 3rd party app) and otherwise keeps the information
on my phone I'd happily jump in.

------
yoz-y
One thing I learnt from working on a calendar app is that the things which
people want to see are seemingly very different from person to person.

In the case of your calendar I would prefer if the events that happen on the
same time would "expand" much sooner. In the example if you want to see both
morning-briefing and my-breakfast-day you need to zoom in to a day view. I
would much rather see these events one under another in the "week" zoom level,
especially since there is a lot of free space available.

------
yellowapple
Hard to scroll down and read the stuff about this app of yours, since the
"app" itself captures my scroll wheel. Had to use the scrollbar instead, which
was a bit lame.

Interesting idea, though.

------
OJFord
Nice! Reminds me of Spence & Apperley's bifocal display ('fisheye') calendar
[1], but on a single axis.

I remember thinking when I saw that in an HCI course a couple of years ago
that despite being over 30 years old it was a better calendar app UX than
anything available that I was aware of!

[1] - see Fig. 6 of
[http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/r.spence/pubs/SA82.pdf](http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/r.spence/pubs/SA82.pdf)

------
steventhedev
Really awesome app! My only advice would be to move the sidebar to the top
when possible because horizontal real estate is important, especially if you
have lots of long term events.

Other thing I'd love to see in a calendar app is prompting me to track the
exact amount of time I spend on each thing in my calendar. Having contextual
reminders and a split (planned/reality) view would be really interesting. It
would help spot those people who are habitually late.

------
bluetidepro
Slightly off topic, but do you know what I want? A calendar app that allows me
to add events that don't have an end time. Sometimes I know when things will
start, but don't care/know when it will end. Let me make the end time
optional, and then just give me the alert when something happens. It's not
like you get an alert when it ends. I don't get why any single calendar app
I've ever used won't do this.

~~~
autarch
On Google Calendar, you can make events that are 0 minutes long. That'll give
you an alert when it starts.

------
svmegatron
I just want to add to the chorus of people saying they would pay for this. I
too would be delighted to pay for this app. Looks AWESOME, thank you for
creating it!

------
melbamorph
I can't connect to my Google calendars. It just gives me the spinning circle
then tells me failed to connect. When I look after it fails, it shows me my
calendar list but it can't seem to display events. I have tried refreshing and
disconnecting then connecting again but it gives the same error. I love this
calendar concept and would love to give it a go. Any hints? I'm using chrome
on my phone (Nexus5x).

------
cpeterso
I can't scroll the page using my trackpad on Firefox because the scroll events
seem to be captured by the simulated phone and not passed to the page.

------
__d
I like it! A few things that'd be really useful: \- timezones when adding an
event \- and "floating" for eg. morning run \- supporting different start and
end timezones is really useful for plane flights \- a second timezone shown on
the left

I use these things a lot currently (except for the separate start/end
timezones cos no-one does that well, sadly)

~~~
edraferi
Outlook does separate start and end timezones. It's still outlook though.

------
brysgo
I'm getting a 404 on
[http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/libs/jsWrappers.js](http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/libs/jsWrappers.js)

Also, I get a QuotaExceededError for the key oneview_allEvents

(Otherwise, I think this is really great! on android I can just add it to my
homescreen and it feels almost like a native app)

------
sharkoz
It looks awesome, but I have an error when I connect my google calendar. The
header shows 'connexion failed', and the console says : appBundle.js:454
Uncaught QuotaExceededError: Failed to execute 'setItem' on 'Storage': Setting
the value of 'oneview_allEvents' exceeded the quota.

Maybe my calendars are too big ?

------
NyxAGB
Make it into an Android App and add Microsoft/Outlook calendar support and you
got yourself your first customer. Hell even if it's only an I'd still be your
first customer.

On the more construction side it would be nice to have to see at what time an
event takes place by just glancing and no only by clicking or taping on it.

------
bikamonki
Very, very good! Works dandy on my mobile browser. May I ask what js
framework, if any, are you using?

~~~
petermolyneux
No frameworks, just plain js on a html canvas.

------
bakul
Very nice!

One suggestion is to auto arrange to different number of columns based on the
current time unit. Though zooming would get weird -- it would have
folding/unfolding effect or snaky undulations! Not sure if this is possible
but such "zooming" can have other uses....

------
davidmix
a lot like timepage for ios [https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/moleskine-
timepage-calendar/...](https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/moleskine-timepage-
calendar/id989178902?mt=8)

cool idea making it a web app

------
yuchi
I had that same exact idea years ago but didn’t finished it. Congrats, looks
very, very promising.

------
vladharbuz
I don't really understand how zooming works here — if I scroll up then down a
bunch of times, I get really zoomed out and can't zoom back in.

Additionally, the zooming mechanic could use some improvement, as it seems
really jerky on my Macbook.

Good idea, best of luck with it!

------
derflatulator
Nice work. Love the UI, and general concept.

My only criticism would be that the two vertical buttons/labels take up a fair
chunk of the horizonal real estate.

Perhaps just show the right one, and use strings such as "December 2015" and
"22 Thurs (Dec)"?

------
bobbles
Are you planning an iOS native app? I would love this and would pay for it

~~~
petermolyneux
Hi, glad you like it. Yes IPhone version is planned. But will be a few months
yet. You could send me an email and I'll put you on the list.

------
xufi
Very nice. I was meaning to implement something like this in JS (this summer
hopefuly if I dont get busy) as a fun project for my website but something
much smaller. Got any ideas?

------
adsche
That's awesome!

I have a suggestion: I love how when you tap a week number it zooms to that
week. But I think it would be useful if it resets to the previous zooming if
you tap it again.

------
hiergiltdiestfu
I would prefer it as a true app instead of as a webapp. @OP, You mentioned an
apk somewhere in the comments. Is it on an appstore? Couldn't find it on the
Play Store.

------
soneca
I synced it to my Google Calendar, but it imported all the events of my
coworkers calendars that I subscribe to.

It should have a way to remove it from view or not even import them at all.

~~~
alch-
In the menu, you can manage which calendars are shown.

------
evo_9
Very slick UI. A little sluggish if you zoom all the way out and then back in,
but otherwise really nice man.

Also (not that it matters), you misspelled 'hockey'.

------
fiatjaf

        Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'populateCalendars' of undefined
        Uncaught ReferenceError: moment is not defined

~~~
fiatjaf
[http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/](http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/) works.

I like it a lot. Feels much better than Google Calendar, for its simplicity
(although in the browser it feels kinda odd).

I won't use it because I don't like calendars.

~~~
petermolyneux
Thanks for the feedback. I Haven't got the same error as you, but I will have
to find out what has gone wrong. Better than Googles calendar was nice to hear
:)

------
amelius
Looks nice! I think this could be a really successful app!

It would be nice if you could keep us (the HN crowd) updated on the business
side of things.

------
sidcool
Amazing UI fluidness on mobile. Very good idea!

------
andai
Excellent app! I too am jealous you beat me to it.

I just wanted to say one thing, you can make it open source, or wait until
someone else does it.

------
antidaily
Transitions feel very slow to me. If you can make that feel smoother and
slicker, you're really onto something. Cool idea.

------
Razengan
I hope Apple hires you and makes this their default UI for the builtin
Calendar app in next year's iOS/macOS. :)

------
wtbob
Really neat idea. I'm sad that the site requires JavaScript, but I don't know
how this would work otherwise.

~~~
petermolyneux
Glad you like the idea. Yes, it would of been hard to build without
javascript. But if you use android you can get the app :)

------
cha-cho
A very clever idea. The UX and the ease to onboard with the demo are both well
executed. Congratulations!

------
kjcharles
Really nice design! I think the simplicity compared to Google Calendar could
suit a lot of people.

------
doczoidberg
Great app. I hope you will make apps via apache cordova from it and upload it
to the app stores.

------
robbbbbbbbb
I signed up for the email but I didn't get a download. Did anyone else have
any luck?

------
johndifool
Double-clicked on the left side bar and it locks it without being able to re-
open it.

------
aruggirello
Very nice and intuitive UI! Any thoughts about supporting ICS/VCS?

------
castell
It reminds me of the WinFS "Journal" demo application.

------
imdsm
Does this integrate with my current calendar, say at Google?

~~~
philjackson
The website heavily encourages connecting your Google calendar.

------
wavelattice
This is cool. A search function filter might be nice.

------
ashitlerferad
Anyone have a screenshot of this? (No JavaScript)

~~~
rplnt
[http://i.imgur.com/7J0wHPk.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/7J0wHPk.jpg)

These are two levels of zoom pictured, that's the idea basically - you can
zoom and scroll on the "timeline".

------
jsilence
Awesome UI!

Does it support CalDAV?

~~~
wjoe
+1 for CalDav support, currently it looks like it only works with Google
Calendar.

I've moved away from Google Calendar to self-hosted CalDAV, but there's a
frustrating lack of good Calendar apps that support it. I'd like to give this
a try!

------
orkshaman
Still hard to add new event

------
choward
Where is the source code?

------
alien3d
Nice.

------
jsprogrammer
I like it. I've been working in a similar view.

How do I get rid of all your items?

~~~
petermolyneux
Well your looking at the demo calendar. You'll have to switch to your google
account to get total control. Hope that helps /Peter

~~~
jsprogrammer
Ah, got it. It would be nice to have a standalone option, though. I don't
necessarily want to be integrated with Google.

------
HeavyStorm
Hey, you quit designing video games to make a calendar? Godus sucks, BTW.

~~~
blowski
Different Peter Molyneux.

