GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 206484
Add year scrolling to date picker
Last modified: 2012-05-16 21:02:36 UTC
I don't think it really makes sense to store the year for birthdays. I don't know how Evo actually deals with birthdays yet as I just set one for the first time, but I would expect it would set a reminder each year since most people have birthdays _every_ year =) Maybe you need to store the year internally and increment it each time it is inserted into the calendar, but as far as the UI goes I think it shouldn't be displayed. OH! It just occurred to me (duh!) that you could actually enter the person's actual birthday--the day month and year he or she was born. That makes some sense although 90% of the time I don't care how old someone is, I just want to remember the birthday each year. Perhaps the year could be made optional somehow. In any case, if the year is included for this reason (keeping track of someone's age), the calendar popup needs serious improvement since for anyone more than a year or so old, selecting the year would involve a LOT of clicking back through the months. Of course I suppose you could type it. I just tried that and noticed that there doesn't seem to be any error correction/autoformatting for the date entry.
This is a calendar widget.
Note from a user. Don't remove the year field from Birthday. :) If you know their birth year, keep that year in their Birthday, so you can track the person's age. If you don't know the birth year, just put this year. I doubt the vcard format supports any special marker like "year not known" or "year irrelevant" for these fields. Same goes for the Anniversary field.
I agree that leaving the year, at least optionally, makes sense. But have fun putting in someone's birthyear with the current UI. That's a lot of clicks! I still think it should be made optional; no year displayed until someone selects a year. My birthday is not 08/16/2001 (I wasn't born yesterday!), and next year it ALSO won't be 08/16/2001. My suggestion: displaying "????" for the "undefined" year wouldn't be terribly pretty, but it would be intuitive AND no worries about internationalization, as far as I know :) It should be the first or last choice in the year-selection UI, however that is designed.
As a result of the UI freeze today, I'm marking all remaining non-1.0 UI bugs to 'future'. Someone reading this should only change the target back to 1.0 under the following circumstances: 1) The change would not impact documentation. (i.e., 'how to do X' would not have to be changed in any way.) 2) The change would require trivial work for the programmers involved. Most likely, only the programmers themselves are able to judge this. So, if you are not on the evo team, or cannot provide a patch to them for this, you should probably not make any such changes. Sorry that this is going to impact so many irritating bugs, but we have to prioritize our limited resources.
I think you should use different widgets for this. I don't think the EDateEdit is appropriate, given the above arguments. And I'm not sure if EDateEdit should be extended to handle this special case. I'd suggest splitting it into day, month and year widgets. Use an entry for the day and year, and an option menu for the month. The year could be left empty, or the birth/wedding year could be entered if desired. clahey, what do you think? If you agree, move the bug back to the address book component.
I think that making it easier to move years at a time would be a good date edit feature anyway. As louie points out above, it's too late to get a good fix for the rest of this for 1.0, so we'll look at it again later perhaps.
Selecting a year for a birthday takes a while (unless I type it). A better way to zoom to years would be good. The idea of "year unknown" is nice too.
*** bug 215596 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
bug 236050 is a dupe of this.
*** bug 236050 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
See bug 231662 : Recurring events with start date before 1970 don't show up correctly.
making the year setting optional is still missing in 2.0.3 - for unix time bugs (before 1970; after 2039) now see bug 244382.
Should I move this to Gnome bugzilla?
Apologies for any spam... cc'ing usability-maint on all Evolution usability bugs. Filter on EVO-USABILITY-SPAM to ignore.
Created attachment 72235 [details] [review] Year wise scrolling is enabled
that patch probably needs rework from a translation point of view, e.g. /* This is a strftime() format. %B = Month name, %Y = Year. */ - e_utf8_strftime (buffer, sizeof (buffer), _("%B %Y"), &tmp_tm); + e_utf8_strftime (buffer, sizeof (buffer), _("%B"), &tmp_tm); + e_utf8_strftime (buffer_yr, sizeof (buffer_yr), _("%Y"), &tmp_tm); or + atk_object_set_name (a11y, _("Next_year")); and other issues.
The packing is broken with this. It needs lots of rework apart from translation.
Bumping version to a stable release.
Created attachment 214213 [details] [review] evo patch for evolution; Updated patch, with improved "packing", and translation comments. The "packing" was quite tricky. Currently, if more than one month is shown, then only the first has scrolling on month and year, the others not (it used to have scroll buttons on the left and on the right edges of the widget).
Created commit 9179758 in evo master (3.5.2+)