
Logarithmic calendar view - epe
http://www.marco.org/480805355
======
ambition
So obvious, but only in retrospect. This is insight at its best.

~~~
nandemo
It is so "obvious" that it would be very easy to "steal" the idea and not give
credit to Marco. After all, you could always say you had the idea
independently.

~~~
tsally
Unless you are doing cutting edge research, it's impossible to verify an idea
you've invented independently is truly original or not. Even then, there's no
guarantee (see: Newton and Leibniz).

So I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make.

~~~
nandemo
Oh, I was merely emphasizing ambition's point in a roundabout, non-serious way
(I'm not suggesting that people don't give credit to Marco).

I don't agree that it's impossible to know if an idea is original or not. For
instance, on one extreme, if 2 composers published a very similar concerto at
about the same time, it would be assumed one of them plagiarized the other. On
the other extreme, if you're working on an arithmetic problem and there's only
one answer, then of course no one would be accused of plagiarism.

------
jasonfried
The Backpack Calendar has a default 6 week view with the current week at the
top. The only way to see previous weeks is to expressly go back in time.
Otherwise, you're always looking at this week + 5 more weeks ahead.

<http://backpackit.com/calendar>

~~~
necubi
Google Calendar, too, has a very useful three week view which does the same
thing.

~~~
vdm
Not enough for me. I would really appreciate being able to adjust the number
of weeks (3-6) to show.

The view should show 1 week past and the rest future, regardless of the
current time of month, and have continuous rather than chunked scrolling.

------
kulkarnic
I'm surprised noone brought this up, but this has been done (several times)
before: the one I remember is called DateLens by Bederson et al at UMD (See
[http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=972652&dl=GUIDE...](http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=972652&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=85212779&CFTOKEN=83057884))

It's interesting how similar ideas keep coming up every so often.

~~~
dws
Also touched on in the sections on "Fisheye View" by Leung et al., "A Review
and Taxonomy of Distortion-Oriented Presentation Techniques" in Card et al.,
"Readings in Information Visualization", Morgan Kaufman, 1999.

A bit of googling also turns up [http://eagereyes.org/blog/2008/fisheye-
calendar-at-yahoo.htm...](http://eagereyes.org/blog/2008/fisheye-calendar-at-
yahoo.html) and a PDF of Bederson's paper on Fisheye calendars
[http://www.lib.umd.edu/drum/bitstream/1903/1201/1/CS-
TR-4368...](http://www.lib.umd.edu/drum/bitstream/1903/1201/1/CS-TR-4368.pdf)

------
jazzychad
Maybe I'm the only one, but I have a mental picture of my calendar using the
upper-right quadrant of a Cartesian Plane. Days are on the X axis, Hours are
on the Y axis. Events go from bottom-up instead of top-down like in all
physical day-planners. I formed this mental model when I was very young, which
may explain why I can't stand any calendaring apps today.

Does anyone else do this? I've seriously considered contacting a calendar
manufacturing company to print "Cartesian Calendars" in this manner... or if
any such thing already exists, please let me know!

~~~
carterschonwald
well, you could just add a negative sign in from of the times and just write
bottom up with a standard calendar

------
inrev
The Agenda view in Emacs's org-mode has similar ideas. In the week view you
see great detail for the current day and a short overview of the days to come.

Here is a screen-shot I found online: <http://tiny.cc/3gwoj>

------
3ds
maybe like this mockup i just made?

<http://create.ly/g7qpwcay1>

~~~
minus1
I was thinking something like this that maintains a column format.

<http://i43.tinypic.com/zu2m2d.png>

~~~
patio11
That is brilliant. I think I'm going to steal it for my next app, for
integration sometime after the MVP is done.

~~~
minus1
Speaking of which, when do we get to hear about your new project?

~~~
patio11
When I have something interesting to say. I started work on it on Monday, for
certain values of "work".

------
reduxredacted
Fantastic idea, though I noted that the author said _"I work the same schedule
every weekday and I rarely meet with people."_ , which is something I can't
relate to. I meet with a lot of people, regularly.

From my perspective:

\- Last week is important on Monday ... but only on Monday. I do a quick
review/plan for the following week and I use data from the previous week for
accountability purposes -- as in: Did I deliver on action items from the
previous week? I like to get that out of the way on Monday morning so as not
to have it hanging over my head the rest of the week.

\- Some appointments and meetings are more important or come with greater
consequences if missed. The day view is dead on, but I'd expand it to be a pad
of "Day View" (a.k.a. What's Important hour by hour) at the top with starred
items beneath. For instance, my Dentist charges $75 if an appointment is
canceled with less than three days notice (this is _never_ enforced, but his
time is important, too). My current method is to set a reminder four days
before. Once I receive the reminder, I validate that I can make the
appointment and reset it to remind me 1 day before hand so that I can cancel
anything else that is short-notice that conflicts, then I reset the reminder
to 20 minutes prior so that I get off my duff and drive to the Dentist office.
I have a similar kludge for important meetings or ones that require a great
deal of prep work. Since I check my calendar constantly, I could avoid all of
this nonsense if it was just sitting under a thick line beneath my "Day View"
as a constant reminder.

------
megamark16
I recently found and implemented a nice jQuery calendar plugin called
FullCalendar in a client site I'm working on. It was terribly easy to
integrate into the site thanks to Django. I think I'm going to tinker with it
now to see if I can get it to use this type of display as a view option, since
it already offers different view options.

~~~
tzury
don't forget to publish your results ;-)

------
lotharbot
Seems like an idea worthy of some testing and tweaking.

I could go for a 3-column (or row, depending on display type) calendar, where
the first column shows today in detail, the second column shows the next week
in lesser detail, and the final column shows the next month in even less
detail.

Perhaps clicking on a given day would bring that day into the first column and
adjust the rest of the calendar accordingly. A big fat "today" button and
arrows to skip by day/week/month would be fantastic.

(As the OP says, a better artist would mock this up. I am not a better artist.
Sorry.)

------
jhund
I did a quick mockup of a interface that would work for me. You can see both
future and past. However you could slide today over to the left and reveal two
more future columns if that interests you more.

By scrolling/swiping you could change the day with focus. Also by tapping on
any visible date, you could give focus to that day. Also a "Today" button to
go to the present.

<http://downloads.clearcove.ca/NonLinearTime.png>

------
JeffJenkins
Outlook's month view lets the scroll wheel scroll through weeks. I've never
understood why everything doesn't do that. If I could get real Outlook on my
mac I'd drop Apple Mail in a second. It's so much better of a program (even
ignoring the exchange parts)

------
spuz
Google Calendar has an Agenda view which simply shows your upcoming events as
an ordered list. I use this as my default view and use the monthly view when
scheduling new events.

------
kentosi
I can't access google calendar at the moment (at work), but when I use it i
have it in a view that only shows the next 7 days. This ticks one of the boxes
this guy's talking about.

As for having an expanded view of today, and a reducing detail view of the
following days ... that's a great idea i think.

~~~
vtail
You know you can go to <https://www.google.com/calendar/render>?

Google Calendar is also blocked where I work, but using https does the trick.

~~~
kentosi
i would give you 10 mod points if i could. thankyou so much for letting me
plan my life again.

------
AceJohnny
Thuderbird has a pretty good calendering extension called Lightning. By
default it adds a pane to the normal view with upcoming events: "Today",
"Tomorrow", and "Soon" for stuff in the following week. I find that
tremendously useful, and close to Marco's idea.

------
MikeTLive
this idea was posted a few months ago and I can not find it. anyone have
references to it?

~~~
stuartjmoore
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030989>

~~~
stuartjmoore
Just so I don't look like a dick: I don't think he stole my idea. We actually
emailed back and forth a while ago (started about something else, calendars
came up).

People have the same ideas at the same time. It's always nice to get another
perspective.

------
codebaobab
Dan Ingalls (the original implementor of Smalltalk) built a weather station
that showed the weather on a logarithmic graph. Very cool idea.

<http://weather-dimensions.com/index.html>

------
d0m
I simply love this idea. I wanted to create a calendar app and I'll clearly
remember your idea if I have the time to do my project.

