On Oct 19, 2007, at 3:11 PM, Jeffrey Harris wrote:
So, I think the things we should limit are multi-day all-day events, not 1-day all-day events. Does that seem more reasonable? How many multi-day events do you have at a time?
Hmmm... Yes, there are fewer multi-day events, but every once in a while they bunch up. My worst case was in August, when we were moving to a new house. It involved coordinating multiple contractors to do the renovations, so I had some overlapping events for the tile guy, the painter, the carpet guy, the fence guy, a shelf guy installing a custom bookcase, a fireplace guy to put in a new hearth and mantle, and a door guy to move a door to a better spot. On top of that, both my wife and I had to go in for unexpected surgeries (both multi-day stays that overlapped), so we were unable to do a lot of the packing and whatnot, so the family pitched in to help, but they had various vacations and other commitments, each of which had to be worked around. The worst case was one day that had four multi- day events spanned through it: a generic "moving" event, a "Polly in hospital" event, the tile guy's first day (so someone had to be there to let him in), and an event for our niece's family on holiday in Cabo (so they couldn't let him in).
On top of that are all the one-day events from suppliers who refuse to give you anything closer than a four hour window when they _might_ deign to show up. I used one-day events for those because they effectively tied me to one house or the other during the transition.
As the month wore on, events had their dates adjusted: the painter asked if he could work on weekends so he could fill in with a day job that turned up; my wife came through the surgery so successfully that they sent her home two days early; and so on. At the same time, other events were added: we had to call a plumber and an electrician on the old house to clear up some problems. And all-day events sometimes got an actual time promise and turned into timed events, enabling me to squeeze in other activities.
Yes, exceptional circumstances, but iCal came through it well, and kept everything displayed.
Oh, and going through that month did give me a very firm idea about how the spanned events should be ordered to minimize vertical space (i.e., give the maximum number of events in a day). Unfortunately, iCal doesn't use it, so there were a number of days that had gaps. If you want me to write that up somewhere, I can do that.
Odd. My version of iCal strictly limits the number of all-day events displayed to 2 in month-view. What version of iCal are you using?
It claims that it's 2.0.5 (1069). Hope this helps, -- Greg Noel, retired UNIX guru _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
