GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 680083
Hide the events pane when its empty
Last modified: 2013-05-29 23:55:54 UTC
If someone doesn't have any calendar events it makes sense to hide the right-hand pane. We might want to shift the Open Calendar entry over to the other pane in this case. There is already an extension that does this: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/153/nothingtodo/
I was thinking a bit about this bug... Wouldn't updating the calendar dropdown based on the availability of event risk getting disruptive. Let's say you have no events in the coming week, but then flip forward to a coming month and select a date with an event. In that case, should the events pane pop out? Maybe that would become a bit noisy? Maybe one option might be to always show the events pane when there are available calendars setup, and not show it if the user hasn't configured any calendar? Any thoughts?
(In reply to comment #1) > Maybe one option might be to always show the events pane when there are > available calendars setup, and not show it if the user hasn't configured any > calendar? Yes, I think that's what users want.
Sounds right to me.
Created attachment 227546 [details] [review] Calendar: only show events when configured in Evolution When no calendars are enabled, hide the events pane completely instead of showing it empty.
One problem with this approach is that the local calendar is enabled by default, so someone who doesn't use the calendar feature needs to install and open Evolution to hide the pane. We could discuss with evo developers about not enabling the local backend by default (it would be empty until the app is opened anyway), or maybe we could think of better heuristics to implement in the shell, such as "no calendar if only the local one and no events in the last/next X days".
(In reply to comment #5) Would "no events in the future" be a good heuristic? The purpose of the events pane is to indicate what's coming up. If there are no upcoming events, it isn't going to be useful.
I think "no events" is a bad heuristic, as it could change. What happens when we navigate to a month with events, in the past or future?
(In reply to comment #7) > I think "no events" is a bad heuristic, as it could change. What happens when > we navigate to a month with events, in the past or future? There's no need to hide events pane if there are existing events, no matter if they are in future or in the past. The situation we are talking about here is when Evolution is not configured (or not even installed) at all - in this case "events pain" is just useless.
Whatever heuristic we do come up with, I would like to avoid showing the events pane when someone has one or two events way back in time. This could easily happen if someone experiments with using their calendar and then gives up on it.
(In reply to comment #9) > Whatever heuristic we do come up with, I would like to avoid showing the events > pane when someone has one or two events way back in time. This could easily > happen if someone experiments with using their calendar and then gives up on > it. Why? Shouldn't they explicitly remove the calendar source itself, rather than suddenly waking up and it disappearing? What happens when they navigate to the months that have events?
(In reply to comment #10) > Why? Shouldn't they explicitly remove the calendar source itself, rather than > suddenly waking up and it disappearing? I was more thinking about the "I tried using Google calendar but it didn't work for me" case - where someone stops using an electronic calendar, rather than deciding not to use a particular calendar solution. Admittedly, this is a difficult case to accommodate. > What happens when they navigate to the > months that have events? Yeah, that's the problem, although there will be cases where it is extremely rare. If someone only has a couple of events over six months ago, it is pretty unlikely that they are going to be browsing back to them. Let's investigate not enabling the local calendar by default. If that doesn't work out, there's probably a simpler heuristic we can use.
From IRC: <aday> mbarnes, hey, what do you think of bug 680083? <mbarnes> aday: seems simpler to me to just add an expand/collapse button for the events pane than try to guess <aday> mbarnes, yeah, that's an option. would disabling the local account by default be problematic in any way? <mbarnes> EDS calendars have two states: enabled and selected -- I think you're asking for not selecting the local calendar by default <aday> sounds about right <mbarnes> I guess not selecting it by default wouldn't be too problematic for evolution <mbarnes> as long as adding an event to that calendar selects it automatically <mbarnes> I'll have to double check that So, maybe we could hide the events pane if there is no calendar selected? We could also consider adding a toggle to show the events pane if a calendar is selected.
Allan, is there any evo bug to track for not selecting the local calendar by default? Because this gnome-shell patch uses a combination of the enabled and selected to choose if the events pane is to be shown, so it would work with that eds change.
(In reply to comment #13) > Allan, is there any evo bug to track for not selecting the local calendar by > default? Not that I know of.
Now there is one.
One month review ping! This is an EDM bug. (The dependency queue is not empty, but the two fixes can land independently)
Review of attachment 227546 [details] [review]: Looks fine.
This patch depends on the first two in bug 641383, of which you say one was reviewed by Ray, but I'm not sure if that's an ok.
Attachment 227546 [details] pushed as ee50904 - Calendar: only show events when configured in Evolution
*** Bug 666958 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***