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

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

Nice.

> 1. The event editor, as started from the File->New menu:
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/appt.png
> As you can see, the overall number of tabs has been reduced from a max
> of 5 to a max of two. I adopted a design which is somewhat similar to
> a standard party invitation; the user is asked to specify where, when,
> what, and why an event involves. My hope is that this creates a better
> match between the info Evo is requesting, and a common object from the
> real world.

Hm... I don't have a strong opinion on What and Where, but "Why" seems
wrong. It's really more about "What, except in more detail". Also, in my
experience, "Why" on party invites seems to induce people to put silly
cutesy things. :) I'd suggest "Details" or "More Details"

"Repeats: Never" sort of sounds like the event never happens... Maybe
"Repeats: No" ?

> 2. The "Scheduling" tab of the appointment editor:
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/sched.png
> I think that this tab should always be shown, regardless of whether an
> event is an appointment or a meeting

definitely

> If you were to zoom in on that pane (by pressing the "Zoom" toggle),
> then it would look like this:
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/sched_zoom.png

In your unzoomed version, you only show two blocks of time per day... I
assume this is to some degree just that you didn't want to spend all day
re-gimping the text, but could you explain how you did intend to have it
work in the non-zoomed case? How many days would fit into the display at
once, and how many marked subdivisions of each day would there be?

Also, the current meeting editor lets you specify whether to show only
working hours, or the whole day. Are you removing that functionality? If
yes, and you're making it always show the whole day, it will waste
space. If yes, and you're making it never show the whole day, it makes
it impossible to schedule a meeting outside of business hours. If no,
you need another button somewhere... Some additional possibilities here
include: only show the non-business hours when you're zoomed, or only
show the non-business hours if the start/end times you picked extend
outside business hours.

> 3. The dialog used to specify recurrence:
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/recur.png

You should put back the little recurrence preview calendar. It seems
insignificant, but IMHO it really does make Evo's recurrence editor
nicer to use than Outlook's. (And it's especially useful for
"complex"/"imported" recurrences that can't be explained via the other
widgets.)

I'm not sure people will understand what "Imported" means any more than
they understand "Complex". It might be better to just change the dialog
in that case, and put in a label with a sentence or two explaining
what's up, and then have some way that you can throw away the
complex/imported recurrence and start over.

> When recurrence has been specified, the event editor looks like this: 
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/appt_recur_and_alarm.png

If you change "forever" to "until January 27, 2005" or something, the
dialog would get very wide. Especially if you then translate it into
German. Might want to move the recurrence info to its own row?

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.

> 4. The dialog used to specify alarm settings:
> http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/evo2/eventeditor/alarm.png

The main dialog says "Alarms" with an "s", and you refer to "alarms"
elsewhere in your mail, but it only seems possible to create a single
alarm in this dialog... bug or feature? (The current editor lets you
create multiple alarms, though this is a feature I have never used, and
it's not compatible with most of the non-local backends we support
either. Or the Palm, I think. So it might not be awful to remove that
functionality.)

-- Dan