Today, the Calendar Team had the first meeting in history. Isaque, Lapo, Renata, Vamsi and I attended it, and the meeting was extremely productive! In fact, we were able to sketch out the general direction that GNOME Calendar will head towards.

What’ll be added

Lets start talking about the additions that Calendar will have.

A New Sidebar

Our design samurai came up with this idea and it was immediately completely welcomed. We want to do a simpler, less cluttered version of this:

The search would behave just like the redesigned GNOME Control Center, and in fact, using a sidebar fixes many issues we currently have with GNOME Calendar, like the search popover and random glitches all around.

The sidebar will be able to be hidden, just like Nautius’ sidebar, so people can have their old Calendar again, behaving just like it used to behave. Stay tuned.

Week View

Vamsi has been working on Week View for the past few months. It’s harder than it looks like! Still, he’s working on it and we plan to have the week view by the end of this year. The current state is described by him in his blog post, and here’s how it actually looks like (be aware – IT’S NOT FINISHED):

There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’ll get there eventually 🙂

Attendees

This is something I myself use frequently, but cannot do with Calendar. Obviously, this will be integrated with GNOME Contacts and will support mailing the attendees.

What’ll change

There are some pain points that we want to change in GNOME Calendar. Thanks to Renata, we have a much clearer picture about the big bottlenecks of Calendar now: adding new calendars and promoting Online Accounts.

Calendar Management Workflow

Based on Renata’s usability testing results, we’ll improve the way people manage calendars by changing its workflow. We’ll use this oportunity to finally implement the initial setup wizard, which we have mockups for quite some time now:

We’ll also turn the calendar management dialog into a wizard-like dialog, and make it more pleasant to work with.

Year View

The current Year View is not in the greatest shape possible. The single biggest issue right now is that the months in Year view are different from the months in Calendar (and GNOME Shell):

Fortunately, Isaque has a deep understanding of the Year view, and we’ll turn Year view into a GtkFlowBox-based widget, and share the same month widget (and behavior) all around. Exciting times ahead!

What’ll be removed

Nothing (just a bait for the trolls :P)

Conclusion

Of course, I didn’t cover every single thing discussed in the meeting. Obvious things like recurrences, more reminders, natural language support, jump to date and many other things are not worth the time – they’ll be added. Period.

In general, I’m very happy that this meeting happened. There is a team of contributors growing around Calendar, and this is awsome! Remember that the very first post in this blog was about the Calendar revival? It was a long way from a dead app to a serious core project. A big thanks for this awsome team that is putting time and efforts to make Calendar a better application – without you guys, there wouldn’t be a Calendar!

Excited? Join us in making Calendar great. Get involved, ping us on #gnome-calendar IRC channel, file bugs and/or document it. Every contribution is endlessly appreciated 🙂

Peace!