Re: [Evolution-hackers] Appointment and Meeting Editors -- 2.0 Thoughts

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

> > Also, the current meeting editor lets you specify whether to show only
> > working hours, or the whole day. Are you removing that functionality? If
> 
> No, I didn't intend to remove it; I just lack data to decide where to
> put it. How often do people change this?

Probably not very often. But I don't think I'm a real enough calendar
user to be able to say for sure.

> So, have imported recurrences ever worked, then? (My understanding is
> that they have always been broken.) It would help me to know how
> imported recurrences are set, if indeed they can be. 

As you should have already seen, I just sent you a meeting invite from
Outlook. If you accept it into your calendar, it will show up as a
complex recurrence.

You can never create a complex recurrence within Evolution, because what
"complex" really means is "something that can't be represented by the
recurrence widgets in the meeting editor". So you can only get them by
accepting a meeting request or importing an ics file created in a client
that lets you use recurrence rules that we don't.

> > Not related to recurrences, but in that screenshot, the time selectors
> > should probably not be visible at all if "all-day event" is checked? It
> > seems confusing to have the times visible but not actually meaning
> > anything.
> 
> Hmm. Well, I agree with you that I should have removed the "11:00" and
> "12:00" from those combo boxes. But, I submit that the common meaning of
> insensitive widgets is "These options exist but aren't relevant to you
> right now", not "These widgets have no meaning". ...

Yeah, I didn't mean the widgets had no meaning, just that the numbers in
them in that screenshot had no meaning. But I see your point about why
it's good to have them visible. A good fix might be, in addition to
disabling them, to set the start time to 00:00 and the end time to 24:00
(or their 12-hour-clock equivalents depending on preferences).

> This feels to me like we're going to have find a balance between
> absolute adherence to the ical spec, and creating a simple and usable
> UI. 

"adherence to the ical spec" is a bit of a red herring. iCalendar is
really big and there are bunches of things that are possible that we
don't currently support, so allowing only a single alarm per appointment
would not really make us less compliant (though we'd have to figure out
what to do when you imported an appointment that had more than one alarm
in it).

> ...
> What do you think?

I'm not a heavy alarm user. Don't look at me. :)

-- Dan