GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 645099
Calendar should display 'next five days' instead of 'before this sunday'
Last modified: 2015-02-27 04:58:39 UTC
Created attachment 183692 [details] GMail's Calendar widget displaying upcoming events regardless of what week they occur in. Filing this bug as instructed by [0]. So, I like the new calendar in Gnome Shell. It really beats the pants off of the way the gnome2 clock/calendar applet worked. But, there seems to be a *tiny* snag that reduces it's usability. When you click on the clock, the calendar widget shows events for 'Today', 'Tomorrow', and 'This week'. That's great, but unfortunately 'This week' really means "List of events that are scheduled to occur after tomorrow but before this Sunday", and it becomes a problem because very frequently I find myself checking the calendar on a Friday, and wanting to know what's on the agenda for Monday, but this information is hidden from me. It would significantly improve the utility of the calendar if the 'This week' section instead displayed events for the following 5 days, regardless of what day of the week it currently is. So for example on Friday, opening the calendar shows you 'Today' (Friday), 'Tomorrow' (Saturday), and 'This week' (Sunday through Thursday). Opening the calendar on a Saturday would then show Monday through Friday in the 'This week' section, etc etc. I suppose in extreme cases where people have a lot of things scheduled, the number of days displayed could be ratcheted down to save space, but for us humble peanut farmers who only do one or two things per day, it's nice to see the whole upcoming week at a glance. The attached screenshot just shows how GMail's Google Calendar widget displays upcoming events in a flat list regardless of whether that event occurs before or after Sunday. The problem I specifically have is that I have that exact calendar imported into Evolution, and GNOME Shell shows me that I have to work on Saturday but doesn't show the dentist appointment on Sunday, which is kind of important to remember. Only four days are visible but it scrolls smoothly revealing future events, up to months into the future. I'm not saying GNOME Shell should show a scroll bar and show all events forever, but it would be nice if it weren't limited by arbitrary weekdays. [0]: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/msg00267.html
How about showing a fixed number of events, disregarding the days they are occurring? Something like: Today, Tomorrow, This week, Next week, Later. This way, we still show events on a per-week basis, but if there's enough space or too few events in the current week, we take advantage of it. In the end, the main constraint comparing with Google Calendar is that we don't show a list expanding to infinity: if you have already enough events in the current week to fill the list, there's not much the Shell can do to show you the next week.
It seems I spoke too soon, as looking at my calendar today (a Friday) shows 'Today', 'Tomorrow', and 'Next week', which shows Sunday through to the next Saturday, which is more than enough time. This means that the problem is not nearly as bad as I originally thought it was, but I do still feel that I should be able to see Sunday's events when I check the calendar on Thursday. Milan, I do like your idea, as that would allow consistent use of space in the calendar regardless of how many upcoming events the user has. The calendar could simply be made to display the next 20 or so events (this number could be tweaked to find the optimum number of events to fill the space without being too cluttered or too sparse). The calendar could continue grouping the events into 'Today', 'Tomorrow', 'This week', and 'Next week' headers, but it would stop arbitrarily cutting off events from Sunday on a Thursday.
Created attachment 185218 [details] Dummy calendar server FWIW, here's a dummy calendar server that makes it a lot easier to debug that the Shell UI is showing the right events. The server simply returns a single event for each day aptly named "Daily 10a-3p appt (2011-04-05)". Compile it with gcc -o gcs gcs.c -Wall `pkg-config --cflags --libs gio-2.0` and then run it like this $ GCS_DEBUG=1 ./gcs --replace gcs[8552]: 12:31:05.255: Connected to the session bus gcs[8552]: 12:31:05.257: Acquired the name org.gnome.Shell.CalendarServer gcs[8552]: 12:31:05.259: Handling GetEvents() since: 2011-03-27 12:16:00 EDT unix=1301242560 until: 2011-05-01 12:16:00 EDT unix=1304266560 force_reload: true gcs[8552]: 12:31:05.298: Handling GetEvents() since: 2011-03-27 12:16:00 EDT unix=1301242560 until: 2011-05-01 12:16:00 EDT unix=1304266560 force_reload: false It should look like this http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gcs-screenshot.png (Note: I wrote this dummy server to chase another bug... but am attaching it here since it is generally useful for validating that the Shell UI is doing the right thing. And so it's archived somewhere.)
I'd like to voice my support for "Today", "Tomorrow" and "Next 5 days", like the reporter. Fact of the matter is I don't live my life week-to-week like that, my "weekend" often - in fact, most of the time - comes on a Wednesday+Thursday. And it has been that way the last 3 years. The 2 years before that I freelanced, and before that again for 5 years I had a 9-5 job with regular weekends. I think more and more people are finding themselves in customised work situations like this where their weeks are not as predictable as tradition would have it. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I just see my side of the fence? But that's my €2 anyway :)
The new calendar design never shows events for more than one day at a time, closing.