Ivan Čukić

dr Ivan Čukić

Author of "Functional Programming in C++", KDE developer and Free/Libre software enthusiast

For inquiries about KDE projects (requesting features, submitting bugs, asking general questions etc.), you can use:

KDE Community Forum
Bug reporting site
#plasma IRC channel

You need to contact me directly?

KDE related:
ivan.cukic [at] kde.org

Non KDE related things:
ivan [at] this domain

IRC Network: libera.chat
Nick: ivan|home
Channel: #plasma

Projects

Blog categories

Functional Programming in C++

If you like C++, you might be interested in my book. It contains quite a few gems of modern C++ programming.

It is available for purchase at:

Patronage

Plasma calendar mock-up

Published by Ivan Čukić in the KDE development: Plasma section, on 26 October 2013

I’m working on different ideas for the activity switcher for plasma 2. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much inspiration for that. The only thing I had a real inspiration for was the calendar.

I really dislike out current calendar widget. It is confusing, and the layout is overcrowded and asymmetric (in a bad way :) ). It often confuses me when it shows events - I always think everything is today.

So I made this. It is just a mock-up, no real code yet. Opinions?

Comments:

Ivan Čukić
A lot of comments in a very short period. Nice :)
@Victor: <em>"Also, when showing today details, it would be nice to see the date too, as in other cases"</em>
Yes, of course :)
@avlas I don't really plan to change the clock widget part, at least not at this point. But, since 99% of everything will be QML, it shouldn't be hard to roll out your own version of any applet you like.
@labatts Yes, clicking will be required.
@Daniel We are doing everything in QML these days. I can't get away from that even if I wanted to.
@Kevin Kofler Well, holidays are like other events, maybe less important. Every type of event will get some sort of a highlight.
@Ilya Yes, korganizer needs to be the source for the data.
@Daniel Korbel I don't think we'll ever go for the dark-by-default setup, but it is changed easily.
@Abhinand Still fairly limited unfortunately. But, the mock-up would be possible even with plasma 1.
@apol I always liked darker themes more. But I hope that this will be as "flashy" with air :)
@Blackpaw @bull3t It is based on slim-glow, but it is not really a real theme - it is a mock-up.
@smis Not a bad idea.
@llpp Agreed. Pop-ups look cool, but are not really a solution. I planned to go for something along Aaron's idea.
@tom You are welcome to send patches, or to help creating shelf for qt5/plasma2.
@Aaron <em>clicking on a day could take you to the agenda view, however .. which would resolve all those issues nicely</em>
That is something I've been thinking for a while. Just was too lazy to mock that up as well :)
I'm afraid that will lead to too many clicks - the same reason behaviour for which I dislike kickoff.
@John To be honest, I don't like the layout of the proposal in the link. Namely the analogue clock. Maybe it looked nice to its creators, but it produces an unbalanced UI, similar to what we currently have.
As for the 'zooming' part which allows quicker month selection and similar, that is something I meant to do.
@konqoro <em>"...such a fuction so the tabs would better stay..."</em> The main reason for the tabs was that there are people who would rather have the event list opened by default, and not the grid. If it was hidden, to show up only after clicking, it would not fit those users.
codeminister
"I always think everything is today": I have the same experience. With your suggestion "today" is clearly highlighted. Great.
Kevin Kofler
What happened to the holidays? I hope you are going to keep the coloring for them (which is missing in your mockup), and to show them in the popup for the day (which your mockup does not demonstrate). It'd be very bad to lose this functionality, I really find it useful, and I know others do too (or we wouldn't get bug reports when something's wrong with the holidays being displayed).
Ilya
Hello, Ivan.
It is a very beautiful concept art.
Combining calendar with todo/timetable is great, but only if it is fetched from korganizer.
Underlined days mean that some events are planned for those days? If yes, then passed days shouldn't be underlined or at least not underlined with same color. However, attached list of events should be shown on hover/click even for them.
Also if you plan to add holidays indication support that should also be different color.
And _please_ make all these colors configurable as current calendar widget is unreadable with some color schemes. You've shown dark theme variant, please test with light themes too.
Daniel
Absolutely gorgeous. Can't see anything I might change except make it friendly as a stand alone plasmoid as well as docked in the tray. I especially like the Agenda and Calendar dual view concept. Very ergonomic.
I've done a decent bit of QML and I highly reccomend that you make it entirely in QML based and use script engines for fetching data. This would make it easy for others to do their own versions of it easily.
Johannes Huber
Looks like an real improvement to me. :)
jay
beautiful. the current plasmoid is indeed confusing about which day is today and which are holidays or whatever.
Sorry for not giving anymore input, but your proposal looks great!
Michail Vourlakos
Very beautiful Ivan, this is a fantastic improvement!!!
Victor
Wow! This is so nice! Thank you for this! I was complaining about the current calendar widget everywhere i go! The only wish to have as "close" button, because currently you can close the widget only clicking date-time again, which is not convenient sometimes.
Waiting for the new calendar!
Victor
Also, when showing today details, it would be nice to see the date too, as in other cases
Carl
Good.
I have the same problem with the current panel calendar...not sure what the right hand side says.
At first I didn't like the persistence of the calendar with click-some-other-place as other panel widgets do. Now it's useful...almost always I need to look at the calendar with something else open.
avlas
Very nice. One thing I don't quite like in the current calendar widget is that it doesn't give the option to have same style for time and date: date always appears in smaller font sizes, no shadow effects, etc...
I'd like to have time and date in same line and with same style (as an option if you like) but that's currently not possible.
labatts
One thing that I like about the OLD calendar is that I do not have to click on a date to see what even is happening. To me, it looks like the mock up requires us to click on the date to see what is going on. This makes the whole widget less useful.
I would rather keep the running list of upcoming events, and redesign it so that it is less confusing to people.
e099
> I do not have to click on a date to see what even is happening.
The current behavior (hover the date to see what's happening) is not always good.
For example: You have 20 events on a day x and you want to know the time of the last event on day x, so you open the calendar plasmoid and you hover the day x. All events of day x appear in the list, but the list is too long to show all events at once and so a scrollbar appears too. So you want to scroll down to the last item and you start to move your mouse towards the events list. But while you are moving your mouse, you hover other days too and so the event list will be changed.
This is a really annoying behavior of the current plasmoid.
So I think the clicking on a date behavior of Ivans awesome (!!) calendar mock-ups should be the way to go! ;)
Btw. a very beautiful and clear design. Good job!
markg85
* note: looks like John Layt already expected me to reply ;) *
Oh wow! That is really looking slick - the second one with the blue circle for the current day - and fits your theme very well! I wish the calendar looked like that today :D
In all fairness, it's not very difficult to theme the QML Calendar that Heena made for this years GSoC in your mockup. I think all you need is probably one day. The only difficult part would be the popup.
I do want to comment on the "zooming" a bit. It "is" possible in QML, but it's very tricky to get that part right. I think John and i simply have to start playing with this at the next PIM sprint to just make his QML Calendar idea :)
Lastly for the 2-way calendar stuff (actually it's reading, modifying and writing new events). I hope to have much of that done after the upcoming pim sprint. It's not awfully difficult to implement but i'm just lacking a bit of motivation to further implement that.
STiAT
Oh god .. nice. Though, Aaron has a point about the click vs hover thing, but it looks like a huge improvement to the current state.
Fri13
I don't accept the pop-ups in pop-up. Not just that it is such, but because it brakes the usability rules by hiding the calender itself with that pop-up. You can not hover over other date to see data of that or click a date below the pop-up.
The current calender is much better, it just needs its problems fixed what are information changing by hover. Instead information of day changed by hover, it should be by clicking a date.
The current calender can not be improved easily as it is otherwise almost perfect.
What I would only add to it, is a option to have a colored circles of times on that date when there are special calender reminders. So full circle is a 24 hours and you get a reminder/meeting time as color part of that circle.
The normal days etc could be just rectangles (if really wanted) but reminders/meetings what user add as special should be circles. Android did have this in its calender but it was a block where were colored smaller blocks marking the reminder/meeting schedule. The current calender supports resizing so there user has plenty of space for such visual information (as long they are only visible by option and when there is something so "free days" are without any visual clutter.
In your mockup there are many problems.
1. Month is given too much space. It change only once a 30 days so you don't need to remind person about month. Give it less space like the current one.
2. Tabbed view. It forces user to check both views (more clicks) and harder to navigate around both. The current doesn't force that habit at all.
3. Pop-ups. As said, they just confuse and are on the way causing more clicks or annoying situations how to get them away or how to get behind them.
4. Non-default style in mockup. If you want to make a suggestion, please do it using default KDE style and theme so it can be seen how it would look, instead using a custom style where own idea can be "better looking".
5. Week numbers. For many week numbers are #1 feature in calender as they deal with people with week numbers instead days. In your idea there is no room or changes to have them. As agenda view doesn't support having a week long listing
josephk
hi Ivan,
IMHO the two pane approach, for how we have it, isn't that bad. Personally I like having calendar and important events displayed at once, it gives me sens of control. So, generally I find correct our current implementation. Your mockup, with the tab approach, actually hides away next event/appointment, which is absolutely of front-page relevance.
Bu what and how to improve it?
As we read in comments, it's difficult to distinguish between current day, appointment days, holidays. This issue can be easily solved with proper theming in oxygen. More, it's not of any interest to highlight stuff of passed days.
Another issue: appointments pane can be overcrowded. Let's just show by default entries of the next appointment's day, or find an even smarter way to filter things by relevance.
Maybe the most important thing to me: let's add an easy, direct way (QML buttons) to Edit, Add, Delete events from the applet. I'll say it 1000 times.
Let's hide week numbers and day-selector like in your mockup, and give an option to show the firsts.
my 2 cents cheerio
John Layt
<div class="comment-good">I think the one thing this discussion shows is that everyone has different needs and uses for the calendar. Personally, the date grid is the most important part for quickly seeing when a particular day number is in relation to today, or when a holiday is. If I want events I usually go to KOrganizer or Google Calendar directly where I can see more data better organised in more space. It only serves to emphasise my point about having a choice of options or widgets that can be configured to meet peoples needs. Have a set of base views like calendar grid and agenda that either auto-adjust to the current workspace layout or can be configured by the user.
The current side-by-side is not that bad and works on wide screens, it just has problems that can be solved like sometimes being empty (so fill it with more stuff), or the date at the top not being today's date so confusing you (so have a clear header for today's date by default). With a properly thought through user experience it can be a useful option.
I definitely agree that trying to cram too much info into the default widget is a bad thing, such as different colour-coded circles and squares and dots on the day number. I've looked at a lot of widgets, and some like Chandler have far far too much info embedded in them for casual use. While I don't oppose anyone writing such a widget as an advanced add-on, it should never be the default choice.
Oh, and I certainly would never add the clock in like the Win7 widget, like you say plain ugly and unbalanced, not to mention unnecessarily duplicating already visible info. Those screenshots were there to show how Win7 does it, and the text to suggest how we can do it better.</div>
Ivan Čukić
@John Layt
+1
smls
Unlike some commenters, I actually *like* the "pop-ups in pop-up" concept, as long as the child-popups open/close on-hover and thus act more like tooltips.
Why can't we have both:
1) *Hover* a date to get the tool-tip - allowing you to quickly see (but not interact with) a summary of that day's events
2) *Click* a date to switch to the persistent "Agenda" view - allowing you to see the full events list, copy text off it, maybe even add new events, etc.
admiral0
YES. Do this asap please. It's awesome!
John Layt
@smls We actually used to have an on-hover pop-up, but the big problem was that the hovering pop-up covered some of the date grid so you couldn't move your pointer over those other dates to select them. There were issues with teh size of the pop-up and how much data to fit into it. It was also very annoying to just move the mouse and across the grid and have a whole series of random pop-ups appear and disappear. Some attempts were made to fix these by increasing timeouts and pop-up spacing, but didn't really solve it.
fasd
FINALLY A USABLE CALENDAR PLASMOID!
mirage
delightful. this looks like a huge improvement above the traditional kde4 calndar i every aspect. I hope see some improvements about right-click menu and have the option to use the windows theme or the plasma theme. coz I would like to has plasma theme on contectual menu. well this is the first step :)
mank319
What
3D
Ohhh, yeessss! Thank you! Really appreciated! Finally.
Ivan Čukić
@markg85
I'll check-out your Heena's and your work, and get back to you. :)
@josephk
For me, the two-pane approach is a thorn in the eye. It looks as ugly as hell. Especially when you do not have any 'upcoming events'.
One of the things that could be done is to allow the user to resize the widget - if it is wide enough, it shows the panes side-by-side, and if not, the tabs.
<em>"hides away next event/appointment, which is absolutely of front-page relevance"</em>
I actually consider the calendar to be mostly irrelevant. For me, the tab shown on the popup would be the events (it would be the last one used).
@Fri13
<em>"I don’t accept the pop-ups in pop-up."</em>
See comments above.
<em>"So full circle is a 24"</em>
While a nice idea, hard-coding the circles is a bad idea. Adding too many "visual cues" ends up with an ugly interface. The calendar pop-up is not (like other plasma things) a full-blown application where you ought to put everything you can.
1. It is about visuals and ui balance. BTW, the current calendar has the year and the month written twice.
2. You don't usually need both tabs. Some users will use the calendar view more, some the events view. Does korganizer show all the modes at once? Day/Month/Event etc. And it has the space to do so.
3. As said, see the previous comments
4. If a 'custom theme' makes something better looking, shouldn't the default theme be improved?
5. The numbers can be added to the calendar, that it not really a problem.
bull3t
Looks great, a real improvement from current widget.
A side question: which combination of plasma theme/colors are you using?
Aaron Seigo
<div class="comment-good"> visuals are a definite improvement.
whether it works well or not will come down to interaction. lots of people are talking about click-vs-hover and that's indeed an important bit.
personally, being able to quickly scan through the calendar on hover is really quite useful when scheduling with someone (e.g. over the phone)
clicking on a date is required for touch (even though the days are pretty small for that, though this is fixable), but clicking would also give it permanence (so you can move the mouse elsewhere, as others have noted)
having it in a popup on click would pretty much suck though imho, again as others have noted.
clicking on a day could take you to the agenda view, however .. which would resolve all those issues nicely.
looking forward to seeing this in code form. </div>
tom
PS: On another side note, in KDE 4 SC you left us a half-assed/working shelf widget, which would be awesome if it would be full functional. So that being sad, I would rather like to see the shelf widget fixed. :-)
llpp
I remember discussions about "popup in popup" being bad ui design (was it about devicenotifier?) Though I must say I like the looks...
tom
Well, the highlighting is definitely better than in the current widget. But a pop-up in a pop-up? That's no good UI! Can you copy text from the pop-pop-up? Also what happens if you wanna see details on an event, another pop-up?
Also before you start coding, here: http://kdeblog.mageprojects.com/2013/10/01/qml-calendar-korganizer-replacement-the-status-thus-far/ Mark, complains that doing calendar in QML is a PITA, are you guys in sync?
smls
I wonder how it would look if weekends and holidays were given a slightly darker background color then the rest, to set them apart.
I'd probably use background rectangles with 0 spacing, so that the backgrounds of adjacent holidays / weekend-days form a contiguous area - that should prevent it from looking too distracting.
konqoro
Nah, thinking about it I dont like the picture I posted, it makes it hard to discover there is such a fuction so the tabs would better stay
konqoro
Hello,
Nice mockup! and definitely an improvement over the current one.
However I dont like the mouse-over tooltips and the agenda tab, which somehow remind me, how the previous plasmoid works (more or less).
So I would recommend to change that to when clicking on a date the view will change and it will display all the events for the selected date. the user can go back clicking a back button. Something like this http://postimg.org/image/5ouh0125h/
Also could you do a mockup using the default air theme, please?
John Layt
24. Bob: You do realise that Holidays are entirely optional and can be disabled or configured? You can add any country you like, and I do find it very useful to know next Monday is a public holiday, that's a primary use case for a calendar. Oh, and what country file has the World Poetry Day in it?
Aaron: The mouse-over changing displayed events is the single most confusing thing for me and others, a slight bump of the mouse and everything displayed changes. It's very disorientating.
John Layt
<div class="comment-good"> Looks very nice, has some plus points, and some minus points, mostly the pop-ups which we got rid of for good usability reasons. Up to now I've been content with just maintaining the backend while others do the frontend, but after a couple of years of nothing improving (and there's obvious problems that could very easily be fixed) I've been thinking about writing my own as a QML learning exercise.
The main reason I haven't is that Mark has been working on new QML designs, and Heena has been working with him as part of her GSOC project, so I'm sure you'll hear from him.
What I will say is that no one design of a calendar widget is perfect for every form-factor or every user, and trying to auto-adapt works poorly. We need to offer either multiple widgets or more config options so the user can decide.
Another thing to keep in mind is we want to add 2-way PIM support, i.e. adding events to the calendar via the widget so any new design needs to be able to cope with that.
Anyway, I've made a lot of notes about various aspects of the Plasma clock/calendar and PIM integration at http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Clock, in particular the section on widgets at http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Clock#Applets </div>
xx
It would be nice if Saturday, and Sunday would be marked in different colors.
Blackpaw
looks good, like the agenda tab very much.
What Theme/Colour scheme is that?
Peter
I just want to echo all the positive feedback you've had, and the gripes about the current implementation which I think your design decisions show that you already understand. But as someone who's really bad at remembering holidays, could that be preserved in someway? perhaps by clicking "December" you'd get a list of: 24th Christmas Eve etc.
Anyway, very glad to see someone improving the calender (do not get me wrong though, it is still servicable and a lot better than what e.g. windows offer - so credit to the original authors).
altarius
man...just one question: when will it be implemented? :D
regarding the colors for past events: if coming events do have a colored line beneath, i'd do a gray one for past events.
Alejandro Nova
Looks amazing!
But... what happened with Lancelot QML? That was awesome too, and it somewhat stopped.
apol
I think it's good, although you're showing different things. For starters it's not using the default Plasma theme, so it can look flashier to some people for the wrong reasons.
Also I'd really like to have a "Today" plasmoid some day, I'm unsure that it has to be part of the calendar, but maybe I'm wrong. If they really have to be merged, it's a nice way to do so. :)
Nice job!
Abhinand
The calendar widget is one thing I always wanted to see an improvement in, this looks amazing!
I'm just curious though, does plasma 2 allow such complex themes for widgets? Last time I looked at plasma widgets, the theming options were, let me say, "limited"
smls
Very nice.
Daniel Korbel
Great job/idea. I hope You will implemente it
About activity switching: it wiil great if it will be simillar to thesktop switching :P
and one sugestion from me: I work a lot infront of computer I think it wiill be great if kde nativly where in black colours I work a lot infront of computer and have black colours couse its btter for my eyes. black kde will be outstanding and fresh. please think about it :D
dhaumann
http://wstaw.org/m/2013/10/26/plasma-desktopad3405.png shows also a good example of how to differentiate the "current day" from the other specialties.
So yes, what's similarly good in your proposal is that "today" is also highlighted visually differently than other meetings.
Bob
I also get confused by the holidays. When I just want to check what today's date is, the current calendar has a bunch holidays highlighted, which just makes it confusing.
Maybe I am in the minority here, but I don't find the holidays all that useful. I really can't think of an instance when I'd need to know it's "world poetry day." In the rare occurrence I would need to know, I'd just google it or something.
So, I'd actually be quite happy to see the holidays removed entirely or made optional. Or at least keep the bigger ones, and remove the lesser ones.

Write a new comment...