GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 269323
Evolution Calendar slow & confusing
Last modified: 2009-07-22 15:37:38 UTC
The day view/working week view is really GREAT! However the 'one week view' should be dropped as it is of no use as it is redundandent (one will always use the working week view where everything from monday-sunday is much clearer displayed). It seems the 'one week view' is just a special case of the 'month view'. Both of which are extremely slow and confusing, see the screenshots http://fortknox.dyndns.org/bugs/evo-calendar-confusing1a.png http://fortknox.dyndns.org/bugs/evo-calendar-confusing2a.png It takes evolution 8 seconds to render these 6 weeks on a 1GHz G4-powerpc. It should take no more than 1 second and the calendar should be displayed in a much clearer way (as a good example see how the iCal MacOSX app does it, which btw. displays the same month withing fractions of a second on a 500 Mhz G3-powerpc). So what should be changed in the month view ? Looking at what iCal does I would suggest the following: 1. Drop the dynamic view. It is not necessary to be able to display 1-6 weeks starting at any date. It really is enough to have a day/week/month view. In the first/last row the month view should display the end/start days of the previous/next month, such that only full weeks are shown starting with Monday and ending with Sunday. 2. Clicking on a day in the date navigator should not switch between month and week and day view. It should just select the day/week/month. Switching views should be only possible via the icons in toolbar. However navigation (going months up down) in the date navigator should not switch months without clicking a specific date. 3. Really highlight the current day in the month view (currently only the number is highlighted which is very hard to see). Make this field dark grey or something. 4. Only display full-day events as bars (only 1/2 of the size they have now), where the color corresponds to the calendar used and the font color is the inverted color (i.e. white or grey...) 5. Display non full-day events as items, i.e. * 18:00 report bugs * 20:00 sports Implementing it this way (no icons, less bars...) would also help to give a speed increase.
For future reference, please file one report per request/problem
I completely agree with Soeren's comments about the calendar view being slow and confusing. Calendar display seemed to be much more responsive in the 1.4 series. I average about 4 events per day, not including long-running multiday events. I'll also add that in the month view, it's very difficult for me to tell which month is being displayed. The month labels on the first of the month are too small and get lost in the noise with the rest of the calendar entries. I'd prefer to see a big label at the top of the monthly view saying "January".
soeren: i *only* use the week view and not the work week view, for your interest. :-) later evolution releases have become much faster in displaying the calendars (trust me, i've got a 550mhz pc :-). 1. i have to say that i use the dynamic view. it sucks that it's not printable (bug 211264), but i like to see "what's up in the next two/ three weeks". 2. this has definitely been filed in bugzilla. 3. also definitely already in bugzilla. 4. nice idea, i like it. tessa: your comment about the month name not displayed in month view is bug 227794.
even evolution 2.4.1 is still horribly slow... it takes 8 seconds to display the initial calendar and updates when moving around take 2-5 seconds...
There exists an improvement patch for the slowness in bug #300567, thus I'm marking this as a duplicate, also because the rest is, from my pint of view, already fixed in 2.27.5+. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 300567 ***