Hi Mimi,
This is a great start!
A few comments and questions related to the design:
1. I agree with Philippe that for a crowded calendar, you won't be
able to show the call-outs all the time. So, you'll probably need to
make the call-outs appear when someone hovers over the bar, as
Philippe suggested. I also agree that some sort of animation will be
necessary to reinforce the connection between the bar and the call-
out. I'd even go a step further and create a "physical" connection
between the bar and the call-out (see my suggestion below).
2. I assume the blue "This week" event is a sticky because it's on
top of the calendar grid lines. Making the stickies look like the
other OOTB calendar events could create problems because someone
could place a sticky in between the grid lines, making it look like a
regular scheduled event. Stickies should probably be distinguished
visually in some way.
3. Another way to solve this problem would be to always display
events as a bar with a call-out. If you have enough room, keep the
call-out expanded, if you don't, show it only on hover. This way
stickies can look however you want them to look - there shouldn't be
a problem because people will see there's no "time bar." This is also
potentially a better solution for the sake of consistency, because
events always look the same. That is, they always have a time bar and
a call-out.
4. Another thing about Stickies: What happens if someone subscribes
to a calendar of mine that has stickies? How do Stickies get
displayed in, say, Apple iCal or Sunbird? Will the iCal format
support that?
5. What do the white squares on the left side of the green event at
1:00 PM signify? Is that event tentative?
---
By the way, my apartment overlooks 543 Howard St. You should use that
nice roof deck more often. :-)
Have a great weekend!
Brad Lauster
On Nov 10, 2005, at 10:51 PM, Philippe Bossut wrote:
Hey! That's the "bar design" I talked about the other day and
couldn't find... I knew you did something like that Mimi... :)
It's so graphically rich that I feel that the need for animation
will be essential to make the callout work. For a very crowded
calendar, you can imagine a smaller title/time sliding out on hover
on the bar (like a tooltip), this tooltip would expand to show the
notes if you hover long enough or click on an expand widget. Visual
spatial/temporal continuity (hence animation) will be necessary to
make bars and related lozenges work in a crowded space. It's very
much a "Flash like" design actually.
I do like it (+1 for me) but we'll need a solid graphic engine to
develop something like that.
Cheers,
- Philippe
Mimi Yin wrote:
Here is a follow-up to the idea of controlling how your events are
displayed on the calendar. It's essentially a call-out model for
displaying crowded calendar data. Instead of allotting real estate
to events based on how much time the event will take up, why not
display the duration of the event with a bar graph and then use a
user-resizable callout to display the data associated with that
event?
The idea being that the duration of the event 1. is NOT
necessarily proportional to how much data you need to display
about that event AND
2. is NOT necessarily proportional to how prominent you want to
make the event
The calendar would look pretty standard for people who don't have
very busy schedules, but would gradually move into "callout" mode
as it gets more and more crowded, or as you overlay more and more
calendars.
I'm going to forward this thread over to the scooby webUI list.
See mockup below.
** SNIP **
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