Plasma Calendar data engine & widget future plans

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On January 29, 2010, John Layt wrote:
> I'm currently revising the KHolidays library to be more useful, in
> particular: 

sounds like a really great list of features!

> I'm planning to use the Plasma Calendar as a test client for these changes
> and so want to add the following:
> 
> * Support multiple holidays on each day

i think we already do internally, but we don't visually display "this day has 
more than one holiday"

> * Support multiple holiday regions at once
> * Choose which holiday region(s) to highlight as days off

sounds good

> * Tool-tip on hover over day showing any holidays

right now that's done with a click. it certainly has its draw backs, and a 
tooltip sounds like it might work, my only concern is covering the rest of the 
calendar which could be annoying.

> Of course, this is it is also a start on how to display PIM data from
> Akonadi (if not yet the two-way integration).  I'm not sure if anyone is
> planning to work on that yet, but decisions on how to display holidays
> will affect pim and so need to be thought about together.

i think the kde pim people likely have more experience in these matters than 
we do, and so it would be good to bring them into the discussion early on as 
well. best would be if the plasma calendar and what we see in korganizer 
harmonizes visually.

i think the plasma calendar should remain simple and provide more of an 
overview than korganizer does, but they should "work together" visually as 
well as functionally imo.

> * Do we provide users the option of choosing the highlight method for each
> holiday type, or not to highlight some types? 

if we do, this should be desktop-wide imho.

 > * How do we highlight holidays, just stick to the current halo, or support
> multiple methods such as halo colour, day number colour, day number
> bold/italic, and cell background colour/shade.

> * How do we highlight multiple holidays and types on the same day cell?  Do
> we rank holiday types so we show only a single highlight for each day,
> apply ranking at the highlight method level, or try show all types at
> once?  (See bug 46262 for some user suggestions on PIM display in
> general).  Has anyone used other calendar applets that do this well that
> we can learn from?

these two are related. we really want to be able to show, simultaneously:

* this day has holidays
* this day has appointments
* this day is a non-working day

i don't think we can show much information at all in the plasma calendar 
without making it very large. we can, however, alter the background and the 
halo around the days.

this sounds like a job for visual design: how to communicate three piece of 
boolean information in a small space using color and shape only.

i don't think we'll have the ability to show all the information (1 holiday, 3 
appointements, etc.) in one small square, though.

maybe showing horizontal bars across the day itself showing when appointments 
take place would be best?

in fact, with that approach we could show how many appointments one has in 
which blocks of time. holidays could be shown with a different background 
treatment (e.g. color) and "days off" could simply not have bold text used for 
the date?

another possible idea: when you hover over an entry it could expand and show a 
bit more information in it, such as the number of each kind or activity.

when clicking on a day, it could replace the calendar view with more 
information and some helpful buttons: calendar (return to the calendar view), 
next and previous days, open in $CALENDAR_APP

when the calendar is hidden, it could be reset to the month view.

> * How to show Weekends (shading of cell or day header?) and Day of
> Religious Observance (red day number? possibly do same for all religious
> holidays?).

this is one for the visual designers, i think.

> * In configuration, for selecting multiple holiday regions I was thinking
> to have all the available regions listed like the timezones are, but with
> two tick-boxes, one for "show on calendar" and another for "show as
> days-off".

sounds good to my ears ...

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks