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
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.
It’s written in Coffee Script (sorry, it was all the rage in 2012) but if you create an HTTP server in the root of the project everything should work out of the box because I checked in the compiled sources. To zoom in and out use shift-drag.
Wow that's crazy. I saw your comment and thought "no way." I'm not the most tied into open source development but it is very surprising to me that something that is so embedded inside Rails is not being actively developed. I wonder if Rails is going to move away from it now as it probably should anyway?
This is such a bummer to me. I was a late-comer to CoffeeScript (just joined a project at a company that's been using it for years), and I absolutely love it. I was really skeptical ("JavaScript works just fine! Why change the syntax for no reason?"), but it's so slick.
This is awesome! I find Fantastical's presentation to be very poor (though love their input), Sunrise is now on the way out... The UX you came up with is amazing!
I'd pay as much as I paid for Fantastical for your native iOS app with CalDAV support, right now. Even more, to make sure you keep developing it.
If you're certain it has to stay free, please consider open sourcing it. Shopping for critical Apps every three years 'cause authors got bored of it is painful.
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.
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.
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.
The zoom and touch gestures are there on mobile. Ideally the same would be available for laptops that have the same gestures on their touchpad. Presumably this would require something like Pointer Events:
It's an excellent idea to have a calendar that can be zoomed without steps. You just got to think of a way to make it easier for user to know how to scroll and zoom. Maybe two finger swipe should be scrolling and one finger swipe zoom? I don't know, but please keep up the good work.
Beautifully done. I have had this exact idea for years as well and you basically took the dream app I was going to build "Some Day" and seem to have nailed the execution. Bittersweet feeling for me. ;-) Hope this becomes hugely successful!
You're right on the money. It's not the British Molyneux of game design fame but rather a fellow from Sweden. The whois of oneviewcalender.com shows he's definitely from Sweden & lives in Sweden. I won't go any further with the doxxing though. He also owns slidecalender.com too - which I is a less apt name than oneviewcalender.
I'd love to know as well, in particular your stance with regard to the UI concept itself — which is a very interesting take on a common problem.
Is it your intention to proselytise this particular UI concept (i.e., “Everyone should use this type of calender view! It makes calendering better for everyone. Get inspired and go implement it in your own software!”) or to test the waters for a commercial product?
For me, at least, being able to personally audit, contribute, and maintain the software (even in a case where you stop caring about it) is very important to me.
If I want to actually use this thing, how does it persist data? Is there a way to create an account, or do I have to never ever clear my browser cookies (or localStorage)? Accessing across different devices? Etc.
(Not sure if this is just a UI proof of concept or an actual app you expect people to use).
Nicely done. One comment: It took me a while to realize the numbers on the top right triangles are week numbers in the year. Typically I am not concerned with that, not sure if there are general use cases for the week number.
Week numbers are important in scrum and release plannings, and in university (someone mentioned "parity" - some courses happen in odd weeks, others in even weeks). Keep them, I miss them :D
Week numbers are used a lot in my experience. Features are often promised by week X. Events, work schedules and even vacations are also often referenced by week.
It could vary by country as well, when I grew up and went to school it was used a whole lot. I don't remember the last time I saw it though, and since moving abroad I definitely haven't seen it.
It varies a lot by trade and profession. Any place where complex scheduling is part of the job tends to use them (e.g., schools, manufacturing plants, accounting).
I like the zoomable/scrollable view that's a UI improvement. The add event form could do with some UI tweaks. I'm not the biggest slider fan, but that might be a better control for the reminders (with sticky graduations) (instead of a dropdown) and reduce the length of the form.
Some autocompleteness on the 'Where's could be good. Can you make time input easier?
Shifting between calendars needs to be very easy. I used to use Gcal, and I was forever putting events in the wrong calendar.
How do I add an event for next year januari? I can't seem to scroll down to that date. But OK, you can add a new event, drag it to today, then change the date? Apparently not. If I add a new event, I want to be able to change the date in the event details.
Furthermore, scrolling in the details doesn't work properly. (Firefox on OSX) Really nice app for the phone!
Suggestion: don't shade alternate weeks (whether a week is odd or even is meaningless). Instead, shade the weekends, to allow you to easily identify days of the week even when day labels aren't visible.
Peter: you could add it as an offline Apache Cordova app as well, although you would have to be on the lookout for:
- Synching between apps (a fairly straightforward process, but still has to be done, given enough interest on the app [which it looks like you might have])
- System Webviews != Chrome or Safari (depending on iOS/Android version).
I would be happy to hunt this on ProductHunt as well, hit me up on twitter http://twitter.com/joantune if you want to schedule a date or simply reply here and I'll post it there.
I like it! On my Android phone, I tried connecting my calendar - went through the Google with screen but then got some error message ("could not connect"?), and a spinning circle that never went away.
I don't like the working name/domain name. 'One View' itself isn't that bad. But I end up thinking of: "One's view", which sounds more like a comment board or Virtual reality app.
Really cool. I'd love to hear about what technologies you used and what issues you encountered in getting it to the fast/smooth state it is today. Really great work, thanks.
The demo is great. I hope that the tech used to make the demo is also used in the app to reduce duplication of effort and make the two more similar than different.
UX preference: I would rather swipe sideways to scroll between days preserving time of day than scroll vertically through 24h to get to yesterday/tomorrow.
I like Moleskine's design and I have noticed the similarity. But their app is escentially different and if it matters the answer to your question is no :)
* 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.
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
Third point, what if you show a horizontal stack of the events. Only one showing at the time, and the others being thin lines. Scrolling sideways would shift the view of the horizontal stack.
I only now went back and used the scroll bar to find the text under the phone. Could you hijack the scroll wheel only when the mouse is over the phone?
I wouldn't go so far as to call it deeply unsettling, but it does seem odd. For me, I think the reason is that I now have the desire to try and fill in all of those empty decades. And if you have only a few reoccurring tasks (go to gym), then that's all that appears year after year. That was a little odd too.
People don't do well when confronted with planning at that scale. Not only that, but when looking at decade scale, you probably don't want to see daily tasks bleeding in. It's one thing to see a five or ten year plan. It's another to see that you're still planning on going to the gym at 8:30, June 7th, 2026.
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.)
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.
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/
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.
Oh wow, I like this too. I have always wanted to have something like this for myself and my life. And I'd like to see the past populated with historical events, etc.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
If the worst thing about this product is that it doesn't follow Apple's brand guidelines, then it will be an excellent app. I agree that it's a bug but it's hardly "very worrying". The demo is excellent.
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
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.
Good point. One solution I can think of would be to have a button or tab that would turn the longer running events on/off. You could also have the app only display the beginning and ending of an event when you zoom out past a certain point, say 3 days or so. In that situation, you could also use a vertical dotted line to connect the beginning and end, like with message board comments. Another thought would be to have those ongoing events snap to the top and bottom of the screen when you go into the individual day view.
I do mark events like vacation, etc so that I see them coming up and for planning. That keeps me from putting events in the middle of my multi-week vacation.
> 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?
That is a very "now" view of time.
I like my calendar to act as an archive, a diary that writes itself simply through living.
In the moment I may want to only see the beginning and end of a long-running event, but on the whole I want to see what happened/is happening at the given time frame in the past/future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!]
Selecting a calendar allows you to access checkboxes that allow you to disable/enable subcalenders such as national holidays, birthdays and the main calendar.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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).
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)
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.
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.
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....
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
+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!
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
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 :)