[korganizer] [Bug 452264] Appointment reminder handling reduces usability and functionality between 21.12.3 and 22.03.80

[Till Schäfer]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452264

--- Comment #18 from Till Schäfer <till2.schaefer at uni-dortmund.de> ---
(In reply to Volker Krause from comment #16)

Thank you for the explanation. That clears things up (also about the motivation
to replace korgac). 

Here are some of my use cases 

(1) Some event your need to participate. I would like to differentiate here a
bit more.
(1a) As you described. A meeting, where you need some short lived prepare time
in advance. For example: online meetings, a meeting at work in the room next
door. Here a default delay of 5 minutes might be a good compromise. you can
configure a second reminder as a workaroud to not forget the event during
preparation, e.g., 2 minutes before the event. 
(1b) A meeting where you need longer time to prepare. E.g. make some
presentation. I  used to configure a very early reminder and a late reminder in
that case. I think this actually mixes up (1a) and (2).
(1c) A real meeting with someone where you need longer time to get there. For
example: going with the kids to the doctor, doing some sport in a remote
location, etc. As for (1a) you may need some prepare time, which you may want
to delay. However there are some other use cases for delayed reminders. For
example, if you do not know the exact time of someone who will pick you up to
arrive you may enter en early reminder and delay it according to more recent
information. The same is true for public transport, where you may just take a
second option because the first one is missed, canceled or delayed.  Sometimes
this use case is not perfectly separable from (1a). For example, if you have a
real life meeting at work and you do not know if you are at already at work
before that event starts or you actually need to get there (e.g., because you
are working form home at that day).  At the time the event is put into the
calendar, you may not be able to know which case is true. 
(1d) Some event that is not exactly timed. E.g. Meet with some friend in the
"afternoon". In this case i often just create an event for the full afternoon,
such that this time is somehow blocked and I do not accidentally add another
event there. The reminder is set at the earliest possible time of that event,
such that i am actually remembered and may delay it according to recent
information or my personal preference (e.g. I want to finish some other stuff
and just shift it an our, because that would still be early enough to not upset
the other person.) So this is also an example for shifting the reminder past
the start of an event. 

(2) Task management. 
(2a) Prepare for an event with larger task. Eg. make presentation. Some limited
delay possible
(2b) Some TODO. For example: call someone, do the kitchen job at work.

In general there are some workaround for delaying reminders: 
(a) Setting up real TODOs instead of calendar events. IMO this is only well
suited for one time events, e.g., a one time call and you may still want to
delay a TODOs reminder. But at least it will stay there with a high priority in
the list of TODOs. However, TODOs face other limitations as given below:
  -> Recurring Events. TODOs cannot be repeated every xth week or so. E.g., do
the kitchen job every forth week at work. In that kitchen job example, I used
to set up a reminder at the start of the work day. Then I delay it to a
suitable time depending on other work that needs to be done and the situation
in the kitchen (e.g. dishwasher is not full jet, lets look at it in another 2
hour.  This delay is unpredictable). Usually the other blocking events are not
known at the time of creation of the kitchen job event. So configuring a
suitable reminder time is not an option. Especially, I do not want to
reconfigure that event for every recurrence. 
  -> An calendar event depended TODO. This is basically the prepare for
something situation with and extensive amount of preparation time. When
creating a second TODO for preparation in addition to that calendar event, the
TODO is decoupled from the event. If the event is than moved to another day or
deleted you need to modify that decoupled TODO as well, which is very error
prone and cumbersome. Thus, I do not use TODOs in that case. 
(b) Using multiple reminders from the start. As stated previously, not every
event is fully understood at the time of creation. The situation might change
dynamically and thereby an a-priori creation of suitable reminders is not
possible. 

Outlook / Proposal:  
I think, the above use cases are very hard to archive with some well chosen
default delay options. Thus, I suggest to provide a default delay as is (i.e.,
the 5 minutes) and add another button "custom delay" that opens another dialog
with an option to specify a delay time. Some other calendars such as business
calendar 2 (android) take a similar approach to have a custom dialog for more
advanced reminder handling. 

Other things like the direct editing of an event might not be so important to
present directly in the reminder, if the highlighting and editing capabilities
inside KOrganizer are better supported (see shortcomings of current
implementation in Bug 453299: kalendarac: Notifications miss option to edit
event directly).

Thus, the third button then might be used for kontext dependent things like
open position of map or something like that.

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