| Summary: | Month view very difficult to read | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Applications] korganizer | Reporter: | chris |
| Component: | general | Assignee: | kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs> |
| Status: | RESOLVED FIXED | ||
| Severity: | wishlist | CC: | kde-bugs, tuju |
| Priority: | NOR | ||
| Version: | unspecified | ||
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Platform: | Mandrake RPMs | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: | ||
| Sentry Crash Report: | |||
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Description
chris
2003-01-02 12:25:39 UTC
Running 3.1 now and Kontact. Well the month view has improved a bit. The events are now colour coded, this helps lots. However it's still messy when it comes to events with no time associated that span multiple days. In the week view these type of events are shown perfectly (proper colour box). The main problem is when one multiple day event overlaps another, the overlaping segment gets pushed onto another line and so doesn't line up correctly with one of the two events. Different colours now make this easier to ditinguish but what if they are of the same event type ? The two events with the same colour merge into one requiring more time to figure out and possibly mistakes to be made. Also could there be an option to restrict the month view to one month at a time with a title as to which month it is and some buttons for moving forward and backwards through the months. Kind of the like the date picker at the side, only bigger !!! Where are my manners ? Thanks very much for listening. Just a quick vote of agreement with Chris on the subject of the monthly view. I would greatly prefer for the default behavior of the month view to be similar to a paper calendar, in that it should center on the month in question with the name of the month clearly listed and days outside of that month should be grayed out or otherwise color coded. The current viewing format is probably useful to some people, but it is quite different from the monthly calendar views that I suspect most people are accustomed to seeing and I find it quite difficult to use. Thanks for listening, and great job so far! I am now happily using kcalendar exclusively as the desktop half of my palm pilot calendar. Some more suggestions to improve the monthly view: - If "Month view uses full window" is set it is virtually impossible to navigate up and down by week, month or year. Previous versions had arrows on the right side for this purpose - somehow they disappeared :-( Why not adding single, double and triple up and down arrows for scrolling by week, month and year? - If "Month view uses full window" is not set the small month window on the left appears and -hey!- you can scroll up and down with the mouse wheel and these movements are even transferred to the large view on the right. But having a small and a large month view is kind of tautological... Could the mouse wheel also work in the large view and also if "Month view uses full window" is set? That would be great! - The wheel in the small month window works somewhat confusing: If several days are highlighted the window scrolls up and down. If one day is highlighted only, however, this highlighted day moves horizontally, which isn't really useful: scrolling should be up/down also. - Finally a small bug, which occasionlly occurs, which I cannot reproduce intentionally, however: In month view sometimes the horizontal spacing of the days becomes pretty uneven - wide and narrow columns are generated which never become uniformly spaced again unless you exit and restart korganizer. I have observed this on many older versions too. Anyway - thanks a lot for your great software! Rudolf I agree there are problems with month view as well as other view. To make the user interface better, one should look at Sari Laakso's User Interface Design Patterns: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/patterns/Calendar-Strip.html http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/salaakso/patterns/Overview-beside-Detail.html Month view is still not what I want. All I need is for an event that is more than one day long to be represented by a coloured bar across all of the days it is associated with. This is how iCal (MacOS X), Evolution etc do it and it's clearer. A restriction of one month per page in the month view is something I still really miss. I'm using KDE 3.2.0/Korganizer and love it. It would be nice to have the following (in order of importance ;);)) in the Month view : 1) The *current day* should stand out more than the rest of the month, maybe a thicker/bolder border around it and/or with a different background color. 2) This has been mentioned above and I think it would really help to have this, when scrolling/viewing across months, prior months and future months might be shown with a different background color (grey maybe?). 3) An option to set/unset background colors for weekends. Just to visually separate weekdays/workdays from weekends. Also, how about a new feature a *Year* view similar to the output of "cal 2004" I have this view on my IPAQ calendar which I think is useful. Keep up the good work guys!!!! MG Also, the currently (as of 3.3.1) implemented Month View with different colors for different months shows one drawback: The current month seems to always appear in darker blue while the following month appears in a lighter blue. However, when going down the view by one week (for example by mini-month-view mouse scrolling) and the newly selected week lies completely in the following month, then the following month becomes the current month. The consequence of this behaviour is that the colors between months swap and therefore visually confuse the watcher. Just by scrolling down one week, the complete big month view changes completely and you have to find your way anew. As both of the blue month colors make a good appearance, there only has to be a way not to swap them, and instead determining the color of a month by something like (color = monthnumber mod 2). IMO the most important buglet herein is that multi-day events should line up with each-other across days! Showing them as coloured bars rather than (-- buy the KOrganizer developers a beer ----------------------) would also be beautiful. I like the feature by which the month displays _forward_ from the current week (ie. the most recent Sunday) rather than displaying just the current month even if we're near the end (as some comments plead), but the number of weeks should be configurable: if there are too many appointments in each day, they can only be displayed by making the whole window bigger, rather than setting Month View to display, say, 4 rows (weeks) rather than 6. The Current Day should stand out. ps. you guys are doing an _amazing_ job!! Thanks so much :) Oh, just one more comment, please :) It would be wonderful if there were an option to tell the month view not to show the icons that indicate when an event has an alarm or repeats, etc. With the alarm icon and the repeats icon and the time, I need an absurdly small font in order to see what the event actually is without hovering, etc. And I don't really care to be told every month that the event repeats: I just care to be reminded that it's time to do it. Thanks again! *** Bug 75572 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** CVS commit by bram: Addressing some issues in monthview: o Make sure the first day of the selected month is on the first row. (#56546). o Show month name and year above cells. o Give selected cells a sunken effect. o Select cell when selected from minicalendar. o Cleanup in MonthViewCell: Merged cellClicked() and selection() to select(). CCBUG: 52517, 81689 BUG: 56546 M +74 -40 komonthview.cpp 1.122 M +5 -2 komonthview.h 1.61 Scrolling in Calendar views to see previous/next days/weeks If it was possible to scroll up and down on the monthly calendar views to be able to see the next week or previous week, not only the next/previous month.. This could help also to have a mark around the selected day (as for the current day in an another color). Anyway, nice jobs done ! It appears to me there are two schools of thought on the selection of which weeks to display in the Month View. For convenience, I'll call them the "status quo" group and the "calendar" group. The calendar group believes that the month view should display all the weeks from whatever month the selected day is in, that days from the month before and the month after should only be displayed if they share a week with the selected month, and that if they are displayed they should be grayed out or otherwise indicated as unimportant. The status quo group believes that the month view should not be restricted to any particular month, but rather show a rolling forward calendar of some number of weeks -- namely, the status quo. The biggest change this group wants is the ability to scroll the month view up and down with a scrollbar, and the ability to configure the number of weeks shown. By my eye, the advantage of the calendar group is ease-of-use; having the month view and the calendar widget on the left displaying the same dates is more intuitive and less confusing. On the other hand, I believe that at bottom the status quo is more useful -- at least once one has overcome any initial confusion. The status quo allows one to see forward some number of weeks without caring about the specifics of the Gregorian calendar, and without being distracted by past events. This difference is probably irreconciliable, but both sides have enough of an argument that the best solution may be to make it an option; something like Month View Week Selection o Month View displays whole month. o Month View displays [---] weeks forward. where [---] is a spinbox and o indicates a radio button. Since the main advantage of the "calendar" group is ease-of-use, that behaviour should be the default if this question is to be made configurable. Comments? Reassigning all KOrganizer bug reports and wishes to the newly created korganizer-devel mailing list. Solved by the new month view. |