13 ms·

Show HN: New calendar app idea

825 points by petermolyneux 10y ago

wtbob 10y ago
Really neat idea. I'm sad that the site requires JavaScript, but I don't know how this would work otherwise.
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Glad you like the idea. Yes, it would of been hard to build without javascript. But if you use android you can get the app :)
  - PostThisTooFast 10y ago
    "Would of?"
- bschwindHN 10y ago
  Why are you sad that an interactive calendar app requires JavaScript?
petermolyneux 10y ago
Hi all. Just wanted to show you my latest side project (been working on it for a couple of years now). It's a calendar app with a twist. It's developed as a web app, thats wy it could be integrated directly on the landing page. It can also be run on any device directly from http://app.oneviewcalendar.com http://app.oneviewcalendar.com Instead of the traditional monthview and day view I have used a timeline that is zoomable and scrollable. Give it a try, it's quite a different experience. Please leave me a comment :)
- dandare 10y ago
  I absolutely NEED this as a widget on my Android phone screen! Congrats to amazing job Peter:)
- epaga 10y ago
  Beautifully done. I have had this exact idea for years as well and you basically took the dream app I was going to build "Some Day" and seem to have nailed the execution. Bittersweet feeling for me. ;-) Hope this becomes hugely successful!
  - petermolyneux 10y ago
    Oh, Sorry friend I know that feeling. We should of teamed up ;)
    - nojvek 10y ago
      The execution is awesome. So smooth. What are you using for the nice animations and transitions? Is it available on iOS?
    - PostThisTooFast 10y ago
      "Should of?" What?
    - epaga 10y ago
      Well if you ever need help with the iOS version, we still could. :-)
- gravypod 10y ago
  Can it be self hosted by users? Is it open source?
  - petermolyneux 10y ago
    Haven't thought of that, but maybe self hosting could be done. I intend to make the app free, but it isn't open source.
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      Why free if not open source? Because the latter would be a prime requirement for me; the former is not.
      - Freak_NL 10y ago
        I'd love to know as well, in particular your stance with regard to the UI concept itself — which is a very interesting take on a common problem. Is it your intention to proselytise this particular UI concept (i.e., “Everyone should use this type of calender view! It makes calendering better for everyone. Get inspired and go implement it in your own software!”) or to test the waters for a commercial product?
    - gravypod 10y ago
      For me, at least, being able to personally audit, contribute, and maintain the software (even in a case where you stop caring about it) is very important to me. In any event, looks fantastic and best of luck.
    - yabatopia 10y ago
      Don't make it free, charge for it. If it's valuable, people will pay for it.
- kinkdr 10y ago
  Very clever! Good job!
- mediumdeviation 10y ago
  Wait, are you Peter Molyneux the game designer of Fable fame, or do you just happen to have the same name?
  - xeromal 10y ago
    No shit!
  - rbut 10y ago
    Considering it says "By Peter Molyneux, Sweden", I'd say he just has the same name. Peter Molyneux the game designer, is from the UK.
    - bhtru 10y ago
      You're right on the money. It's not the British Molyneux of game design fame but rather a fellow from Sweden. The whois of oneviewcalender.com shows he's definitely from Sweden & lives in Sweden. I won't go any further with the doxxing though. He also owns slidecalender.com too - which I is a less apt name than oneviewcalender.
    - radicalbyte 10y ago
      It's a different guy, I think that this is him: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolyneux https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolyneux
  - pvg 10y ago
    'of Fable fame' is practically blasphemous.
    - bhtru 10y ago
      Different generations different games. Not everyone played Populous.
- jacalata 10y ago
  I like it! On my Android phone, I tried connecting my calendar - went through the Google with screen but then got some error message ("could not connect"?), and a spinning circle that never went away.
  - melbamorph 10y ago
    Same here. I'm on Android phone as well.
- hackney 10y ago
  As long as I can download it direct and not be tied to the playstore I'd love to try it out. I'm currently using the free version of acalendar atm.
  - petermolyneux 10y ago
    I could give you the apk. Send me an email and we'll do it that way.
    - hackney 10y ago
      Whatever. I got your email and it gave me a playstore link. Forget it.
- wingerlang 10y ago
  This is awesome, I have multiple "linear calendar" mockups on my laptop right now that I never actually started up.
- eyan 10y ago
  Very inspiring. Cheers!
- bpp 10y ago
  Love the animation that resolves the home icon into the menu icon.
- prebrov 10y ago
  This is awesome! I find Fantastical's presentation to be very poor (though love their input), Sunrise is now on the way out... The UX you came up with is amazing! I'd pay as much as I paid for Fantastical for your native iOS app with CalDAV support, right now. Even more, to make sure you keep developing it. If you're certain it has to stay free, please consider open sourcing it. Shopping for critical Apps every three years 'cause authors got bored of it is painful.
- downtide 10y ago
  I like the zoomable/scrollable view that's a UI improvement. The add event form could do with some UI tweaks. I'm not the biggest slider fan, but that might be a better control for the reminders (with sticky graduations) (instead of a dropdown) and reduce the length of the form. Some autocompleteness on the 'Where's could be good. Can you make time input easier? Shifting between calendars needs to be very easy. I used to use Gcal, and I was forever putting events in the wrong calendar.
- downtide 10y ago
  I don't like the working name/domain name. 'One View' itself isn't that bad. But I end up thinking of: "One's view", which sounds more like a comment board or Virtual reality app.
- paradite 10y ago
  Nicely done. One comment: It took me a while to realize the numbers on the top right triangles are week numbers in the year. Typically I am not concerned with that, not sure if there are general use cases for the week number.
  - qw 10y ago
    Week numbers are used a lot in my experience. Features are often promised by week X. Events, work schedules and even vacations are also often referenced by week.
    - wingerlang 10y ago
      It could vary by country as well, when I grew up and went to school it was used a whole lot. I don't remember the last time I saw it though, and since moving abroad I definitely haven't seen it.
      - Freak_NL 10y ago
        It varies a lot by trade and profession. Any place where complex scheduling is part of the job tends to use them (e.g., schools, manufacturing plants, accounting).
  - rplnt 10y ago
    Me neither anymore, but I was concerned with week's "parity" in school. I.e. whether the week was even or odd.
  - hiergiltdiestfu 10y ago
    Week numbers are important in scrum and release plannings, and in university (someone mentioned "parity" - some courses happen in odd weeks, others in even weeks). Keep them, I miss them :D
- manmal 10y ago
  Are you sure you didn't get heavily inspired by Moleskine's Timepage?
  - petermolyneux 10y ago
    I like Moleskine's design and I have noticed the similarity. But their app is escentially different and if it matters the answer to your question is no :)
- downtide 10y ago
  The demo locked up my machine while trying to add an event.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hollander 10y ago
  How do I add an event for next year januari? I can't seem to scroll down to that date. But OK, you can add a new event, drag it to today, then change the date? Apparently not. If I add a new event, I want to be able to change the date in the event details. Furthermore, scrolling in the details doesn't work properly. (Firefox on OSX) Really nice app for the phone!
- feiss 10y ago
  Really cool! makes me want to use a calendar app and plan my life! :D
- joantune 10y ago
  Peter: you could add it as an offline Apache Cordova app as well, although you would have to be on the lookout for: - Synching between apps (a fairly straightforward process, but still has to be done, given enough interest on the app [which it looks like you might have]) - System Webviews != Chrome or Safari (depending on iOS/Android version). I would be happy to hunt this on ProductHunt as well, hit me up on twitter http://twitter.com/joantune http://twitter.com/joantune if you want to schedule a date or simply reply here and I'll post it there. Cheers, and good job, it looks good
- Kip9000 10y ago
  I like the idea but semantically, this is confusing. If I want to scroll, it zooms in/out. Even that, it doesn't keep the focus making me wanting to really scroll. Now I'm really confused how to scroll. (I know how but I'm giving you the cognitive load that's necessary here). What would be cool is to use zoom gestures to ....zoom . That is completely intuitive. Aside from that, vertical bars take too much screen space without adding much information. Perhaps they could be translucent or some such.
  - yuchi 10y ago
    It’s scroll-jacking to let users without a touchpad to zoom in and out. I expect the mobile/touch version to be way more sensible.
    - Kip9000 10y ago
      I know, but users without touchpad had zoom functionality (like ctrl+wheel or ctrl+scroll) for years. Don't get me wrong I like the zoomability of a calendar, it is an excellent way to visualise information.
      - yuchi 10y ago
        Managing both is very difficult, at least until we get pointer events supported (http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer)
        wuliwong 10y ago
        I'm confused by what is difficult. In this case I would make the UX allow the native scroll trigger to operate and then add a zoom trigger. If you make the zoom triggers to be both ctrl+click and two finger pinch then it will work across all devices (ie. mobile/desktop/touchpad/mouse). I agree that it will be great to be able to target touch pads or mouse/keyboards but I believe it is pretty simple to fix the UX on this app.
  - thomasfl 10y ago
- yuchi 10y ago
  As I said in another comment, I was developing something incredibly similar many years ago. I really believe it’s the best UI for a calendar. I hope to help you somehow, I opensourced that small thing I built then: https://bitbucket.org/yuchi/dirt-testing-1 https://bitbucket.org/yuchi/dirt-testing-1 It’s written in Coffee Script (sorry, it was all the rage in 2012) but if you create an HTTP server in the root of the project everything should work out of the box because I checked in the compiled sources. To zoom in and out use shift-drag.
  - dorianm 10y ago
    CoffeeScript is still popular today even if it's not as "hyped" as it used to.
    - bcherny 10y ago
      Unfortunately the CoffeeScript project seems to be in maintenance mode, and hasn't had a release for ~9 months. Probably something to do with the ad hoc compiler and lack of ES6 support. See https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributors https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributor...
      - wuliwong 10y ago
        Wow that's crazy. I saw your comment and thought "no way." I'm not the most tied into open source development but it is very surprising to me that something that is so embedded inside Rails is not being actively developed. I wonder if Rails is going to move away from it now as it probably should anyway?
      - rev_bird 10y ago
        This is such a bummer to me. I was a late-comer to CoffeeScript (just joined a project at a company that's been using it for years), and I absolutely love it. I was really skeptical ("JavaScript works just fine! Why change the syntax for no reason?"), but it's so slick.
        10y ago
- wuliwong 10y ago
  Really cool. I'd love to hear about what technologies you used and what issues you encountered in getting it to the fast/smooth state it is today. Really great work, thanks.
  - karmakaze 10y ago
    The demo is great. I hope that the tech used to make the demo is also used in the app to reduce duplication of effort and make the two more similar than different. UX preference: I would rather swipe sideways to scroll between days preserving time of day than scroll vertically through 24h to get to yesterday/tomorrow.
- masukomi 10y ago
  seriously good job with the demo page.
- jordanlev 10y ago
  Very cool -- nice work! If I want to actually use this thing, how does it persist data? Is there a way to create an account, or do I have to never ever clear my browser cookies (or localStorage)? Accessing across different devices? Etc. (Not sure if this is just a UI proof of concept or an actual app you expect people to use).
- muxxa 10y ago
  Suggestion: don't shade alternate weeks (whether a week is odd or even is meaningless). Instead, shade the weekends, to allow you to easily identify days of the week even when day labels aren't visible.
- frostymarvelous 10y ago
  This is totally awesome. Do you already have plans to build it as a mobile app? Do you have someone to build it? I'd totally be willing to give it a go.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'populateCalendars' of undefined Uncaught ReferenceError: moment is not defined
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/ http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/ works. I like it a lot. Feels much better than Google Calendar, for its simplicity (although in the browser it feels kinda odd). I won't use it because I don't like calendars.
  - petermolyneux 10y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I Haven't got the same error as you, but I will have to find out what has gone wrong. Better than Googles calendar was nice to hear :)
itaysk 10y ago
I like the creativity, but I think for daily use I still prefer the table inspired week view (or 3 day view for portrait mode) as it gives me a better sense of orientation. For execution you get A+ :) really well executed.
steventhedev 10y ago
Really awesome app! My only advice would be to move the sidebar to the top when possible because horizontal real estate is important, especially if you have lots of long term events. Other thing I'd love to see in a calendar app is prompting me to track the exact amount of time I spend on each thing in my calendar. Having contextual reminders and a split (planned/reality) view would be really interesting. It would help spot those people who are habitually late.
WWKong 10y ago
Beautiful. How do you build something like this? Coding language? Stack? Dev environment?
- elmigranto 10y ago
  Yes, all of those don't really matter. You just fire up whatever and start building the damn thing.
  - gorkemyurt 10y ago
    well in this case I think it does.. Animating this many DOM elements in a performant way would be really hard. Looks like the webapp is rendered in a <canvas/> element. I think its a better discussion than 'which js framework should I use?'
    - petermolyneux 10y ago
      Thanks for your interest. Performance has been har to get good enough. Basically it is a javascript app on a canvas. Thats why it can be integrated on the landing page.
      - dclowd9901 10y ago
        You seem to have accidentally invented a really slick UI library for canvas. I have been working off and on on something like that for the last 3 years, but yours is actually factually working. I really hope you publish it.
      - amelius 10y ago
        Interesting. Do you repaint the entire canvas on every update?
sidcool 10y ago
Amazing UI fluidness on mobile. Very good idea!
robbbbbbbbb 10y ago
I signed up for the email but I didn't get a download. Did anyone else have any luck?
asimuvPR 10y ago
The demo is really slick. The app does feel better than Google calendar. What was it built with? :)
Stenerson 10y ago
Very clever design, looks great. A few thoughts on navigation: I'm on a mac and I felt that the zoom using the "scroll wheel" (i.e. track pad) was pretty disorienting. I was expecting it to scroll. Having to click and hold down to scroll doesn't feel right. I also instinctively thought the arrow keys would work but they didn't. I'd suggest up/down (obvious) and left = zoom out, right = zoom in.
jsprogrammer 10y ago
I like it. I've been working in a similar view. How do I get rid of all your items?
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Well your looking at the demo calendar. You'll have to switch to your google account to get total control. Hope that helps /Peter
  - jsprogrammer 10y ago
    Ah, got it. It would be nice to have a standalone option, though. I don't necessarily want to be integrated with Google.
kjcharles 10y ago
Really nice design! I think the simplicity compared to Google Calendar could suit a lot of people.
plainOldText 10y ago
This app looks very similar to Timepage by Moleskin – which has been around for a while.
spditner 10y ago
Reminds me of the Fisheye Calendar from UMD's HCI Lab, which was doing experimentation with Zoomable UI's: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/fisheye.shtml http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/fisheye.shtml
sharp11 10y ago
Beautiful UI, very intuitive! One issue I ran into (on a MacBook Pro, OSX El Cap) was that scrolling wouldn't work on my (external) trackpad. It interpreted 2-finger scroll as pinch (down) and zoom (up). Had to use trackball to scroll.
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Hi, glad you liked it!! On the trackpad scrolling and zooming is done as on google maps. That is a two finger scroll does zooming and a single finger pressed and dragged does scrolling. Hope that helps.
  - mcintyre1994 10y ago
    This looks awesome! Would you consider Google maps style mobile zoom too? In particular their one finger zoom is really great on mobile. Two typographic things on the recurrence settings: frequence should read frequency, "week days" is a bit confusing, I'd probably change it to "on these days"
davidmix 10y ago
a lot like timepage for ios https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/moleskine-timepage-calendar/id989178902?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/moleskine-timepage-calendar/... cool idea making it a web app
omarforgotpwd 10y ago
This is a cool demo, but why would someone want to have all these long running events on the screen at all times? It makes the UI cluttered and less clear what the next thing is you need to be doing. For example, do I really need the fact that I'm on vacation to be taking space at the side of the screen at all times? I'm not going to forget. This kind of design makes it easier for me to miss things I need to remember to do, perhaps defeating the point of using a calendar app
- jacalata 10y ago
  I like it, because I have things like "parents in town", "partner in Canada" or "no soda challenge" that are relevant to any specific decision I make for a few weeks. Do I really want to see that movie with friends while my parents are here, or should I keep that evening free? If he's out of town then I won't plan a date night then.
- brianobush 10y ago
  I do mark events like vacation, etc so that I see them coming up and for planning. That keeps me from putting events in the middle of my multi-week vacation.
- buro9 10y ago
  > For example, do I really need the fact that I'm on vacation to be taking space at the side of the screen at all times? That is a very "now" view of time. I like my calendar to act as an archive, a diary that writes itself simply through living. In the moment I may want to only see the beginning and end of a long-running event, but on the whole I want to see what happened/is happening at the given time frame in the past/future.
- hurbledr 10y ago
  Good point. One solution I can think of would be to have a button or tab that would turn the longer running events on/off. You could also have the app only display the beginning and ending of an event when you zoom out past a certain point, say 3 days or so. In that situation, you could also use a vertical dotted line to connect the beginning and end, like with message board comments. Another thought would be to have those ongoing events snap to the top and bottom of the screen when you go into the individual day view.
johndifool 10y ago
Double-clicked on the left side bar and it locks it without being able to re-open it.
xufi 10y ago
Very nice. I was meaning to implement something like this in JS (this summer hopefuly if I dont get busy) as a fun project for my website but something much smaller. Got any ideas?
alien3d 10y ago
Nice.
dasil003 10y ago
There's something existentially terrifying about being able to quickly zoom out from out from a view of 5 minute intervals to one of several decades.
- sidcool 10y ago
  Exactly my thoughts too! Might be humbling and perspective shifting.
- bikamonki 10y ago
  Terrifying yet inspiring! Must make the best of such short existence :)
  - copperx 10y ago
    I'm not trying to be negative, but I disagree. It's deeply unsettling.
    - mbreese 10y ago
      I wouldn't go so far as to call it deeply unsettling, but it does seem odd. For me, I think the reason is that I now have the desire to try and fill in all of those empty decades. And if you have only a few reoccurring tasks (go to gym), then that's all that appears year after year. That was a little odd too. People don't do well when confronted with planning at that scale. Not only that, but when looking at decade scale, you probably don't want to see daily tasks bleeding in. It's one thing to see a five or ten year plan. It's another to see that you're still planning on going to the gym at 8:30, June 7th, 2026.
    - kome 10y ago
      Respice post te. Hominem te memento.
      - annnnd 10y ago
        Translation for us lesser humans: "Look after you [to the time after your death] and remember you're [only] a man.
yellowapple 10y ago
Hard to scroll down and read the stuff about this app of yours, since the "app" itself captures my scroll wheel. Had to use the scrollbar instead, which was a bit lame. Interesting idea, though.
bikamonki 10y ago
Very, very good! Works dandy on my mobile browser. May I ask what js framework, if any, are you using?
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  No frameworks, just plain js on a html canvas.
cdcarter 10y ago
Give me a place for my email so you can tell me when it's iOS ready, please!
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Sorry, I should have done that. For now could you use the contact form? Cheers Peter
whatcd 10y ago
Love the pinch-to-zoom on this touch-screen Chromebook. It reminds me of Google Photo's!
jsilence 10y ago
Awesome UI! Does it support CalDAV?
- wjoe 10y ago
  +1 for CalDav support, currently it looks like it only works with Google Calendar. I've moved away from Google Calendar to self-hosted CalDAV, but there's a frustrating lack of good Calendar apps that support it. I'd like to give this a try!
dmvaldman 10y ago
the main view is all rendered in a <canvas> element... wow!
- bschwindHN 10y ago
  Honestly it was probably way easier (and more performant) to implement it that way. I would hate to wrangle DOM elements and CSS to get it to perform that smoothly and lay out in an expected and consistent way. I think most game developers would likely agree.
bobbles 10y ago
Are you planning an iOS native app? I would love this and would pay for it
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Hi, glad you like it. Yes IPhone version is planned. But will be a few months yet. You could send me an email and I'll put you on the list.
DigitalJack 10y ago
Very slick. But something seems wrong with the two finger zoom (or I misunderstand it). It zooms, but it also scrolls a little... so the thing I was looking at will go off screen. For example if I have Sunday the 10th at the top of the screen, and I two finger scroll/zoom, I'm preplexed why the date at the top shifts to earlier or later dates. This happens both directions. Maybe it's intentional, but it's unexpected (for me). I either want to zoom or scroll, not both. I hope you take that as constructive. I really like it otherwise :)
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Hi, I will try it out again. The zooming and scrolling should have been done to perfection, but maybe I've missed something. The two finger zoom is intended to follow your fingers vertically and ignore any horizontal movement.
cpeterso 10y ago
I can't scroll the page using my trackpad on Firefox because the scroll events seem to be captured by the simulated phone and not passed to the page.
chris_overseas 10y ago
This looks very promising, with a few improvements I can easily see this as my preferred calendar app. Feedback: Is it possible to selectively enable/disable individual calendars? I have a "birthday" calendar from a large social network that results in multiple birthdays each day completely dominating the calendar. If I can't turn that off, it's virtually unusable for me unfortunately. I tried to assign up for the Android beta but just received a confirmation email that I'd subscribed, no link to install the app. Is that to be expected? [Edit: I just received a download link in an additional email. Thanks!]
- hacksonx 10y ago
  Selecting a calendar allows you to access checkboxes that allow you to disable/enable subcalenders such as national holidays, birthdays and the main calendar.
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Great, sorry it took some time. I wasn't really ready for all this response :)
bakul 10y ago
Very nice! One suggestion is to auto arrange to different number of columns based on the current time unit. Though zooming would get weird -- it would have folding/unfolding effect or snaky undulations! Not sure if this is possible but such "zooming" can have other uses....
ashitlerferad 10y ago
Anyone have a screenshot of this? (No JavaScript)
- 6nf 10y ago
  What device do you use that doesn't allow you to enable js?
- rplnt 10y ago
  http://i.imgur.com/7J0wHPk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7J0wHPk.jpg These are two levels of zoom pictured, that's the idea basically - you can zoom and scroll on the "timeline".
dheera 10y ago
My biggest gripe with Google Calendar is the lack of consolidation of duplicate events. Often I have about 3-4 copies of various events and a storm of 10+ notifications for every appointment. If you can solve this problem, it would be a killer app for me.
- fudged71 10y ago
  FYI there is a chrome extension which solves this!
  - 13hours 10y ago
    Do you have a link? I have many birthday duplicates on my Google Calendar for example.
    - fudged71 10y ago
      Found it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/event-merge-for-google-ca/idehaflielbgpaokehlhidbjlehlfcep?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/event-merge-for-go...
Vilkku 10y ago
Looks pretty nice. Some criticisms: * I dislike how the website hijacks scrolling, the phone doesn't fit on a Macbook 13" screen so I tried to scroll down, but that just scrolled in the app * When scrolling out to a view where I see many months at once it can only show a few events, in the demo it only shows Gym, and when I zoom in a bit more it also shows Hockey with kids. I feel these recurring events should have the lowest priority when zoomed out, it's more important to see "special" one-off events. * It's not clear that there are events hidden. When zoomed out a lot it's of course expected that this is the case, but when zoomed out a bit more it might be unclear if all events for a time period are visible or not.
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Hi, thanks for the feedback. Sorry for hijacking the scroll, but it just had to be done :) Your second point on recurring events is good, I will look at that. Even more so the last point, that one is really important, but I haven't found a good way to solve it yet. Thanks /Peter
  - josephcooney 10y ago
    Agree re: scrolling - it would have been difficult/impossible to get across the behaviour of the app in the is regard without hijacking.
  - hn_user2 10y ago
    Perhaps heatmap showing number of events.
  - danthejam 10y ago
    You could hijack the scroll only when the mouse is over the phone's screen not the entire page. Very interesting UI!
    - timjver 10y ago
      That's already what happens for me. I can scroll the page just fine if my cursor is off the demo device.
steinsgate 10y ago
Thanks for making this app. I had a similar idea too, but never executed it. Of course, the idea was based on a certain need. Often, I would have unscheduled events such as "talk to Santosh sometime next week" or "go on a short bike trip with Francesca next month". Basically events that have not been assigned a defined date and time. These are the events that I would like to see in the week view or month view (when I zoom out) so that I know that I need to find a specific time for it. The other events (which have a set date and time) receive lower priority in the zoomed out views. Have you thought of implementing something similar? Would be nice.
aruggirello 10y ago
Very nice and intuitive UI! Any thoughts about supporting ICS/VCS?
petermolyneux 10y ago
Hi everone, Thanks for all the great feedback. Anyone applying for Beta-testing will have to wait a few hours. Got my hand full :) Feel free to use the contact form for any questions or if you just want the IPhone version. Cheers, Peter
- maxdesiatov 10y ago
  Hi Peter, iPhone is written with lowercase "i", not uppercase. It is very worrying that wrong spelling is used on the site as well. I hope that application is much better than the spelling on the site. Thanks.
  - blowski 10y ago
    If the worst thing about this product is that it doesn't follow Apple's brand guidelines, then it will be an excellent app. I agree that it's a bug but it's hardly "very worrying". The demo is excellent.
OJFord 10y ago
Nice! Reminds me of Spence & Apperley's bifocal display ('fisheye') calendar [1], but on a single axis. I remember thinking when I saw that in an HCI course a couple of years ago that despite being over 30 years old it was a better calendar app UX than anything available that I was aware of! [1] - see Fig. 6 of http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/r.spence/pubs/SA82.pdf http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/r.spence/pubs/SA82.pdf
yoz-y 10y ago
One thing I learnt from working on a calendar app is that the things which people want to see are seemingly very different from person to person. In the case of your calendar I would prefer if the events that happen on the same time would "expand" much sooner. In the example if you want to see both morning-briefing and my-breakfast-day you need to zoom in to a day view. I would much rather see these events one under another in the "week" zoom level, especially since there is a lot of free space available.
imdsm 10y ago
Does this integrate with my current calendar, say at Google?
- philjackson 10y ago
  The website heavily encourages connecting your Google calendar.
castell 10y ago
> By Peter Molyneux, Sweden Peter Molyneux, the designer of Black & White and Fable? Or just the same name?
soneca 10y ago
I synced it to my Google Calendar, but it imported all the events of my coworkers calendars that I subscribe to. It should have a way to remove it from view or not even import them at all.
- alch- 10y ago
  In the menu, you can manage which calendars are shown.
castell 10y ago
It reminds me of the WinFS "Journal" demo application.
alex95 10y ago
Why are you trying to re-invent something so simple as a calender? People have already adopted the typical calender, so where is the market to change the way it functions?
xavi 10y ago
Reminds me of DateLens http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/ http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/
kagamine 10y ago
When you add an event you scroll down, down, down. The final step is OK/Cancel and they are at the top of the page, centered. I can't reach those buttons with my thumb and have to use my other hand. They should be down at the bottom where the flow of the action ends, left and right justified. Edit. I think it could also benefit from a 'snap to now' button somewhere. I don't have time to use your fancy GUI for literally seconds of my life to see what's going on this morning. Just my 2c. Really nice app. (tu) I hope this doesn't come across as negative, I just want to help.
amelius 10y ago
Looks nice! I think this could be a really successful app! It would be nice if you could keep us (the HN crowd) updated on the business side of things.
adsche 10y ago
That's awesome! I have a suggestion: I love how when you tap a week number it zooms to that week. But I think it would be useful if it resets to the previous zooming if you tap it again.
andai 10y ago
Excellent app! I too am jealous you beat me to it. I just wanted to say one thing, you can make it open source, or wait until someone else does it.
yuchi 10y ago
I had that same exact idea years ago but didn’t finished it. Congrats, looks very, very promising.
cha-cho 10y ago
A very clever idea. The UX and the ease to onboard with the demo are both well executed. Congratulations!
doczoidberg 10y ago
Great app. I hope you will make apps via apache cordova from it and upload it to the app stores.
anotheryou 10y ago
Looks great, when it supports caldav (or uses the calender of my android which is synced via caldav by a 3rd party app) and otherwise keeps the information on my phone I'd happily jump in.
stared 10y ago
One point - when compressing the view I care for rare events (e.g. deadlines, conferences) not things like gym. So I would do the opposite of adding counts. (The same, when I do something daily and I compress days to a single line, I DO NOT want to see it.)
- alch- 10y ago
  I second that, recurring events aren't very interesting to me, and they crowd the view (even when just looking at today / this week). Would be great if they were somehow less prominent. Awesome work though, I love it!
- DeadReckoning 10y ago
  This is an excellent point, give priority to unique events over rare events when choosing what to display over a longer time interval
orkshaman 10y ago
Still hard to add new event
HeavyStorm 10y ago
Hey, you quit designing video games to make a calendar? Godus sucks, BTW.
- blowski 10y ago
  Different Peter Molyneux.
__d 10y ago
I like it! A few things that'd be really useful: - timezones when adding an event - and "floating" for eg. morning run - supporting different start and end timezones is really useful for plane flights - a second timezone shown on the left I use these things a lot currently (except for the separate start/end timezones cos no-one does that well, sadly)
- edraferi 10y ago
  Outlook does separate start and end timezones. It's still outlook though.
derflatulator 10y ago
Nice work. Love the UI, and general concept. My only criticism would be that the two vertical buttons/labels take up a fair chunk of the horizonal real estate. Perhaps just show the right one, and use strings such as "December 2015" and "22 Thurs (Dec)"?
vladharbuz 10y ago
I don't really understand how zooming works here — if I scroll up then down a bunch of times, I get really zoomed out and can't zoom back in. Additionally, the zooming mechanic could use some improvement, as it seems really jerky on my Macbook. Good idea, best of luck with it!
melbamorph 10y ago
I can't connect to my Google calendars. It just gives me the spinning circle then tells me failed to connect. When I look after it fails, it shows me my calendar list but it can't seem to display events. I have tried refreshing and disconnecting then connecting again but it gives the same error. I love this calendar concept and would love to give it a go. Any hints? I'm using chrome on my phone (Nexus5x).
antidaily 10y ago
Transitions feel very slow to me. If you can make that feel smoother and slicker, you're really onto something. Cool idea.
jere 10y ago
Nice! I had a very similar idea, which I made a small prototype for in a HCI course (click on the logo to get test data): http://humbit.com/longcal/ http://humbit.com/longcal/ The vision I had was a horizontal rather than vertical timeline and discrete rather than continuous zooming (though I thought a lot about implementing continuous scrolling). Yours might be the better way to do it, at least for mobile. In any case, I think existing calendar apps fall short. There's no support for planning anything that extends out of the current month. The absolute worst is when you're in the last week of the month and you don't even see things coming up in the next few days. Someone has a birthday and you don't even see it until it's too late. And what about planning things (trips, 30 day challenges, contracts) that last weeks or months? I even think that the shorter perspective affects our ability to do long term thinking.
- visakanv 10y ago
  Oh wow, I like this too. I have always wanted to have something like this for myself and my life. And I'd like to see the past populated with historical events, etc.
- odbol_ 10y ago
  This is why I use Google calendar in the special "4 week view". Always shows the current day at the top so do you only looking at the future.
hiergiltdiestfu 10y ago
I would prefer it as a true app instead of as a webapp. @OP, You mentioned an apk somewhere in the comments. Is it on an appstore? Couldn't find it on the Play Store.
sharkoz 10y ago
It looks awesome, but I have an error when I connect my google calendar. The header shows 'connexion failed', and the console says : appBundle.js:454 Uncaught QuotaExceededError: Failed to execute 'setItem' on 'Storage': Setting the value of 'oneview_allEvents' exceeded the quota. Maybe my calendars are too big ?
jegutman 10y ago
I've thought about hacking a calendar app for myself before. My pain points seemed very different. My main thing was being able to manage recurring events in a way that wasn't awful. I had a lot of recurring reminders to just take care of simple things during the week, but then I would go between time zones and some things would need to be shifted and other things fit an absolute time. Then I would go on vacation and some things needed to be snoozed on vacation but others were still important. I never really found a good solution from this. I just happen to be on sabbatical from working and have a new kid so my life just doesn't work the same way.
bluetidepro 10y ago
Slightly off topic, but do you know what I want? A calendar app that allows me to add events that don't have an end time. Sometimes I know when things will start, but don't care/know when it will end. Let me make the end time optional, and then just give me the alert when something happens. It's not like you get an alert when it ends. I don't get why any single calendar app I've ever used won't do this.
- autarch 10y ago
  On Google Calendar, you can make events that are 0 minutes long. That'll give you an alert when it starts.
- girmad 10y ago
  Many apps let you set 'reminders', which are effectively what you describe.
svmegatron 10y ago
I just want to add to the chorus of people saying they would pay for this. I too would be delighted to pay for this app. Looks AWESOME, thank you for creating it!
evo_9 10y ago
Very slick UI. A little sluggish if you zoom all the way out and then back in, but otherwise really nice man. Also (not that it matters), you misspelled 'hockey'.
choward 10y ago
Where is the source code?
Razengan 10y ago
I hope Apple hires you and makes this their default UI for the builtin Calendar app in next year's iOS/macOS. :)
brysgo 10y ago
I'm getting a 404 on http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/libs/jsWrappers.js http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/libs/jsWrappers.js Also, I get a QuotaExceededError for the key oneview_allEvents (Otherwise, I think this is really great! on android I can just add it to my homescreen and it feels almost like a native app)
NyxAGB 10y ago
Make it into an Android App and add Microsoft/Outlook calendar support and you got yourself your first customer. Hell even if it's only an I'd still be your first customer. On the more construction side it would be nice to have to see at what time an event takes place by just glancing and no only by clicking or taping on it.
wavelattice 10y ago
This is cool. A search function filter might be nice.
hurbledr 10y ago
Very cool prototype. Like many in this thread, I've been dreaming of a calendar app like this, something that I can pick up and use without having to read a bunch of documentation. It seems like most of the calendar programs I've tried to use succumbed to feature creep and ended up being feature rich but unwieldy, so it's refreshing to see such a simple, easy to use program. That being said, the one feature I could really use in a calendar app is to have a sort of ledger column that I could use for budgeting. As a person juggling multiple part-time jobs, it would be invaluable for me to be able to plug in my expected shifts for the week, get an estimate of how much my paycheck would be, and calculate that against my bills for the week/month/year.

825 points by petermolyneux 10y ago

wtbob 10y ago

Really neat idea. I'm sad that the site requires JavaScript, but I don't know how this would work otherwise.

petermolyneux 10y ago
Glad you like the idea. Yes, it would of been hard to build without javascript. But if you use android you can get the app :)
- PostThisTooFast 10y ago
  "Would of?"
bschwindHN 10y ago
Why are you sad that an interactive calendar app requires JavaScript?

petermolyneux 10y ago

Hi all. Just wanted to show you my latest side project (been working on it for a couple of years now). It's a calendar app with a twist. It's developed as a web app, thats wy it could be integrated directly on the landing page. It can also be run on any device directly from http://app.oneviewcalendar.com http://app.oneviewcalendar.com Instead of the traditional monthview and day view I have used a timeline that is zoomable and scrollable. Give it a try, it's quite a different experience. Please leave me a comment :)

dandare 10y ago
I absolutely NEED this as a widget on my Android phone screen! Congrats to amazing job Peter:)
epaga 10y ago
Beautifully done. I have had this exact idea for years as well and you basically took the dream app I was going to build "Some Day" and seem to have nailed the execution. Bittersweet feeling for me. ;-) Hope this becomes hugely successful!
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Oh, Sorry friend I know that feeling. We should of teamed up ;)
  - nojvek 10y ago
    The execution is awesome. So smooth. What are you using for the nice animations and transitions? Is it available on iOS?
  - PostThisTooFast 10y ago
    "Should of?" What?
  - epaga 10y ago
    Well if you ever need help with the iOS version, we still could. :-)
gravypod 10y ago
Can it be self hosted by users? Is it open source?
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Haven't thought of that, but maybe self hosting could be done. I intend to make the app free, but it isn't open source.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    Why free if not open source? Because the latter would be a prime requirement for me; the former is not.
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      I'd love to know as well, in particular your stance with regard to the UI concept itself — which is a very interesting take on a common problem. Is it your intention to proselytise this particular UI concept (i.e., “Everyone should use this type of calender view! It makes calendering better for everyone. Get inspired and go implement it in your own software!”) or to test the waters for a commercial product?
  - gravypod 10y ago
    For me, at least, being able to personally audit, contribute, and maintain the software (even in a case where you stop caring about it) is very important to me. In any event, looks fantastic and best of luck.
  - yabatopia 10y ago
    Don't make it free, charge for it. If it's valuable, people will pay for it.
kinkdr 10y ago
Very clever! Good job!
mediumdeviation 10y ago
Wait, are you Peter Molyneux the game designer of Fable fame, or do you just happen to have the same name?
- xeromal 10y ago
  No shit!
- rbut 10y ago
  Considering it says "By Peter Molyneux, Sweden", I'd say he just has the same name. Peter Molyneux the game designer, is from the UK.
  - bhtru 10y ago
    You're right on the money. It's not the British Molyneux of game design fame but rather a fellow from Sweden. The whois of oneviewcalender.com shows he's definitely from Sweden & lives in Sweden. I won't go any further with the doxxing though. He also owns slidecalender.com too - which I is a less apt name than oneviewcalender.
  - radicalbyte 10y ago
    It's a different guy, I think that this is him: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolyneux https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolyneux
- pvg 10y ago
  'of Fable fame' is practically blasphemous.
  - bhtru 10y ago
    Different generations different games. Not everyone played Populous.
jacalata 10y ago
I like it! On my Android phone, I tried connecting my calendar - went through the Google with screen but then got some error message ("could not connect"?), and a spinning circle that never went away.
- melbamorph 10y ago
  Same here. I'm on Android phone as well.
hackney 10y ago
As long as I can download it direct and not be tied to the playstore I'd love to try it out. I'm currently using the free version of acalendar atm.
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  I could give you the apk. Send me an email and we'll do it that way.
  - hackney 10y ago
    Whatever. I got your email and it gave me a playstore link. Forget it.
wingerlang 10y ago
This is awesome, I have multiple "linear calendar" mockups on my laptop right now that I never actually started up.
eyan 10y ago
Very inspiring. Cheers!
bpp 10y ago
Love the animation that resolves the home icon into the menu icon.
prebrov 10y ago
This is awesome! I find Fantastical's presentation to be very poor (though love their input), Sunrise is now on the way out... The UX you came up with is amazing! I'd pay as much as I paid for Fantastical for your native iOS app with CalDAV support, right now. Even more, to make sure you keep developing it. If you're certain it has to stay free, please consider open sourcing it. Shopping for critical Apps every three years 'cause authors got bored of it is painful.
downtide 10y ago
I like the zoomable/scrollable view that's a UI improvement. The add event form could do with some UI tweaks. I'm not the biggest slider fan, but that might be a better control for the reminders (with sticky graduations) (instead of a dropdown) and reduce the length of the form. Some autocompleteness on the 'Where's could be good. Can you make time input easier? Shifting between calendars needs to be very easy. I used to use Gcal, and I was forever putting events in the wrong calendar.
downtide 10y ago
I don't like the working name/domain name. 'One View' itself isn't that bad. But I end up thinking of: "One's view", which sounds more like a comment board or Virtual reality app.
paradite 10y ago
Nicely done. One comment: It took me a while to realize the numbers on the top right triangles are week numbers in the year. Typically I am not concerned with that, not sure if there are general use cases for the week number.
- qw 10y ago
  Week numbers are used a lot in my experience. Features are often promised by week X. Events, work schedules and even vacations are also often referenced by week.
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    It could vary by country as well, when I grew up and went to school it was used a whole lot. I don't remember the last time I saw it though, and since moving abroad I definitely haven't seen it.
    - Freak_NL 10y ago
      It varies a lot by trade and profession. Any place where complex scheduling is part of the job tends to use them (e.g., schools, manufacturing plants, accounting).
- rplnt 10y ago
  Me neither anymore, but I was concerned with week's "parity" in school. I.e. whether the week was even or odd.
- hiergiltdiestfu 10y ago
  Week numbers are important in scrum and release plannings, and in university (someone mentioned "parity" - some courses happen in odd weeks, others in even weeks). Keep them, I miss them :D
manmal 10y ago
Are you sure you didn't get heavily inspired by Moleskine's Timepage?
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  I like Moleskine's design and I have noticed the similarity. But their app is escentially different and if it matters the answer to your question is no :)
downtide 10y ago
The demo locked up my machine while trying to add an event.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hollander 10y ago
How do I add an event for next year januari? I can't seem to scroll down to that date. But OK, you can add a new event, drag it to today, then change the date? Apparently not. If I add a new event, I want to be able to change the date in the event details. Furthermore, scrolling in the details doesn't work properly. (Firefox on OSX) Really nice app for the phone!
feiss 10y ago
Really cool! makes me want to use a calendar app and plan my life! :D
joantune 10y ago
Peter: you could add it as an offline Apache Cordova app as well, although you would have to be on the lookout for: - Synching between apps (a fairly straightforward process, but still has to be done, given enough interest on the app [which it looks like you might have]) - System Webviews != Chrome or Safari (depending on iOS/Android version). I would be happy to hunt this on ProductHunt as well, hit me up on twitter http://twitter.com/joantune http://twitter.com/joantune if you want to schedule a date or simply reply here and I'll post it there. Cheers, and good job, it looks good
Kip9000 10y ago
I like the idea but semantically, this is confusing. If I want to scroll, it zooms in/out. Even that, it doesn't keep the focus making me wanting to really scroll. Now I'm really confused how to scroll. (I know how but I'm giving you the cognitive load that's necessary here). What would be cool is to use zoom gestures to ....zoom . That is completely intuitive. Aside from that, vertical bars take too much screen space without adding much information. Perhaps they could be translucent or some such.
- yuchi 10y ago
  It’s scroll-jacking to let users without a touchpad to zoom in and out. I expect the mobile/touch version to be way more sensible.
  - Kip9000 10y ago
    I know, but users without touchpad had zoom functionality (like ctrl+wheel or ctrl+scroll) for years. Don't get me wrong I like the zoomability of a calendar, it is an excellent way to visualise information.
    - yuchi 10y ago
      Managing both is very difficult, at least until we get pointer events supported (http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer)
      - wuliwong 10y ago
        I'm confused by what is difficult. In this case I would make the UX allow the native scroll trigger to operate and then add a zoom trigger. If you make the zoom triggers to be both ctrl+click and two finger pinch then it will work across all devices (ie. mobile/desktop/touchpad/mouse). I agree that it will be great to be able to target touch pads or mouse/keyboards but I believe it is pretty simple to fix the UX on this app.
- thomasfl 10y ago
yuchi 10y ago
As I said in another comment, I was developing something incredibly similar many years ago. I really believe it’s the best UI for a calendar. I hope to help you somehow, I opensourced that small thing I built then: https://bitbucket.org/yuchi/dirt-testing-1 https://bitbucket.org/yuchi/dirt-testing-1 It’s written in Coffee Script (sorry, it was all the rage in 2012) but if you create an HTTP server in the root of the project everything should work out of the box because I checked in the compiled sources. To zoom in and out use shift-drag.
- dorianm 10y ago
  CoffeeScript is still popular today even if it's not as "hyped" as it used to.
  - bcherny 10y ago
    Unfortunately the CoffeeScript project seems to be in maintenance mode, and hasn't had a release for ~9 months. Probably something to do with the ad hoc compiler and lack of ES6 support. See https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributors https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/graphs/contributor...
    - wuliwong 10y ago
      Wow that's crazy. I saw your comment and thought "no way." I'm not the most tied into open source development but it is very surprising to me that something that is so embedded inside Rails is not being actively developed. I wonder if Rails is going to move away from it now as it probably should anyway?
    - rev_bird 10y ago
      This is such a bummer to me. I was a late-comer to CoffeeScript (just joined a project at a company that's been using it for years), and I absolutely love it. I was really skeptical ("JavaScript works just fine! Why change the syntax for no reason?"), but it's so slick.
      - 10y ago
wuliwong 10y ago
Really cool. I'd love to hear about what technologies you used and what issues you encountered in getting it to the fast/smooth state it is today. Really great work, thanks.
- karmakaze 10y ago
  The demo is great. I hope that the tech used to make the demo is also used in the app to reduce duplication of effort and make the two more similar than different. UX preference: I would rather swipe sideways to scroll between days preserving time of day than scroll vertically through 24h to get to yesterday/tomorrow.
masukomi 10y ago
seriously good job with the demo page.
jordanlev 10y ago
Very cool -- nice work! If I want to actually use this thing, how does it persist data? Is there a way to create an account, or do I have to never ever clear my browser cookies (or localStorage)? Accessing across different devices? Etc. (Not sure if this is just a UI proof of concept or an actual app you expect people to use).
muxxa 10y ago
Suggestion: don't shade alternate weeks (whether a week is odd or even is meaningless). Instead, shade the weekends, to allow you to easily identify days of the week even when day labels aren't visible.
frostymarvelous 10y ago
This is totally awesome. Do you already have plans to build it as a mobile app? Do you have someone to build it? I'd totally be willing to give it a go.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'populateCalendars' of undefined Uncaught ReferenceError: moment is not defined

fiatjaf 10y ago
http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/ http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/ works. I like it a lot. Feels much better than Google Calendar, for its simplicity (although in the browser it feels kinda odd). I won't use it because I don't like calendars.
- petermolyneux 10y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I Haven't got the same error as you, but I will have to find out what has gone wrong. Better than Googles calendar was nice to hear :)

itaysk 10y ago

I like the creativity, but I think for daily use I still prefer the table inspired week view (or 3 day view for portrait mode) as it gives me a better sense of orientation. For execution you get A+ :) really well executed.

steventhedev 10y ago

Really awesome app! My only advice would be to move the sidebar to the top when possible because horizontal real estate is important, especially if you have lots of long term events. Other thing I'd love to see in a calendar app is prompting me to track the exact amount of time I spend on each thing in my calendar. Having contextual reminders and a split (planned/reality) view would be really interesting. It would help spot those people who are habitually late.

WWKong 10y ago

Beautiful. How do you build something like this? Coding language? Stack? Dev environment?

elmigranto 10y ago
Yes, all of those don't really matter. You just fire up whatever and start building the damn thing.
- gorkemyurt 10y ago
  well in this case I think it does.. Animating this many DOM elements in a performant way would be really hard. Looks like the webapp is rendered in a <canvas/> element. I think its a better discussion than 'which js framework should I use?'
  - petermolyneux 10y ago
    Thanks for your interest. Performance has been har to get good enough. Basically it is a javascript app on a canvas. Thats why it can be integrated on the landing page.
    - dclowd9901 10y ago
      You seem to have accidentally invented a really slick UI library for canvas. I have been working off and on on something like that for the last 3 years, but yours is actually factually working. I really hope you publish it.
    - amelius 10y ago
      Interesting. Do you repaint the entire canvas on every update?

sidcool 10y ago

Amazing UI fluidness on mobile. Very good idea!

robbbbbbbbb 10y ago

I signed up for the email but I didn't get a download. Did anyone else have any luck?

asimuvPR 10y ago

The demo is really slick. The app does feel better than Google calendar. What was it built with? :)

Stenerson 10y ago

Very clever design, looks great. A few thoughts on navigation: I'm on a mac and I felt that the zoom using the "scroll wheel" (i.e. track pad) was pretty disorienting. I was expecting it to scroll. Having to click and hold down to scroll doesn't feel right. I also instinctively thought the arrow keys would work but they didn't. I'd suggest up/down (obvious) and left = zoom out, right = zoom in.

jsprogrammer 10y ago

I like it. I've been working in a similar view. How do I get rid of all your items?

petermolyneux 10y ago
Well your looking at the demo calendar. You'll have to switch to your google account to get total control. Hope that helps /Peter
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Ah, got it. It would be nice to have a standalone option, though. I don't necessarily want to be integrated with Google.

kjcharles 10y ago

Really nice design! I think the simplicity compared to Google Calendar could suit a lot of people.

plainOldText 10y ago

This app looks very similar to Timepage by Moleskin – which has been around for a while.

spditner 10y ago

Reminds me of the Fisheye Calendar from UMD's HCI Lab, which was doing experimentation with Zoomable UI's: http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/fisheye.shtml http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/piccolo/learn/fisheye.shtml

sharp11 10y ago

Beautiful UI, very intuitive! One issue I ran into (on a MacBook Pro, OSX El Cap) was that scrolling wouldn't work on my (external) trackpad. It interpreted 2-finger scroll as pinch (down) and zoom (up). Had to use trackball to scroll.

petermolyneux 10y ago
Hi, glad you liked it!! On the trackpad scrolling and zooming is done as on google maps. That is a two finger scroll does zooming and a single finger pressed and dragged does scrolling. Hope that helps.
- mcintyre1994 10y ago
  This looks awesome! Would you consider Google maps style mobile zoom too? In particular their one finger zoom is really great on mobile. Two typographic things on the recurrence settings: frequence should read frequency, "week days" is a bit confusing, I'd probably change it to "on these days"

davidmix 10y ago

a lot like timepage for ios https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/moleskine-timepage-calendar/id989178902?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/moleskine-timepage-calendar/... cool idea making it a web app

omarforgotpwd 10y ago

This is a cool demo, but why would someone want to have all these long running events on the screen at all times? It makes the UI cluttered and less clear what the next thing is you need to be doing. For example, do I really need the fact that I'm on vacation to be taking space at the side of the screen at all times? I'm not going to forget. This kind of design makes it easier for me to miss things I need to remember to do, perhaps defeating the point of using a calendar app

jacalata 10y ago
I like it, because I have things like "parents in town", "partner in Canada" or "no soda challenge" that are relevant to any specific decision I make for a few weeks. Do I really want to see that movie with friends while my parents are here, or should I keep that evening free? If he's out of town then I won't plan a date night then.
brianobush 10y ago
I do mark events like vacation, etc so that I see them coming up and for planning. That keeps me from putting events in the middle of my multi-week vacation.
buro9 10y ago
> For example, do I really need the fact that I'm on vacation to be taking space at the side of the screen at all times? That is a very "now" view of time. I like my calendar to act as an archive, a diary that writes itself simply through living. In the moment I may want to only see the beginning and end of a long-running event, but on the whole I want to see what happened/is happening at the given time frame in the past/future.
hurbledr 10y ago
Good point. One solution I can think of would be to have a button or tab that would turn the longer running events on/off. You could also have the app only display the beginning and ending of an event when you zoom out past a certain point, say 3 days or so. In that situation, you could also use a vertical dotted line to connect the beginning and end, like with message board comments. Another thought would be to have those ongoing events snap to the top and bottom of the screen when you go into the individual day view.

johndifool 10y ago

Double-clicked on the left side bar and it locks it without being able to re-open it.

xufi 10y ago

Very nice. I was meaning to implement something like this in JS (this summer hopefuly if I dont get busy) as a fun project for my website but something much smaller. Got any ideas?

alien3d 10y ago

Nice.

dasil003 10y ago

There's something existentially terrifying about being able to quickly zoom out from out from a view of 5 minute intervals to one of several decades.

sidcool 10y ago
Exactly my thoughts too! Might be humbling and perspective shifting.
bikamonki 10y ago
Terrifying yet inspiring! Must make the best of such short existence :)
- copperx 10y ago
  I'm not trying to be negative, but I disagree. It's deeply unsettling.
  - mbreese 10y ago
    I wouldn't go so far as to call it deeply unsettling, but it does seem odd. For me, I think the reason is that I now have the desire to try and fill in all of those empty decades. And if you have only a few reoccurring tasks (go to gym), then that's all that appears year after year. That was a little odd too. People don't do well when confronted with planning at that scale. Not only that, but when looking at decade scale, you probably don't want to see daily tasks bleeding in. It's one thing to see a five or ten year plan. It's another to see that you're still planning on going to the gym at 8:30, June 7th, 2026.
  - kome 10y ago
    Respice post te. Hominem te memento.
    - annnnd 10y ago
      Translation for us lesser humans: "Look after you [to the time after your death] and remember you're [only] a man.

yellowapple 10y ago

Hard to scroll down and read the stuff about this app of yours, since the "app" itself captures my scroll wheel. Had to use the scrollbar instead, which was a bit lame. Interesting idea, though.

bikamonki 10y ago

Very, very good! Works dandy on my mobile browser. May I ask what js framework, if any, are you using?

petermolyneux 10y ago
No frameworks, just plain js on a html canvas.

cdcarter 10y ago

Give me a place for my email so you can tell me when it's iOS ready, please!

petermolyneux 10y ago
Sorry, I should have done that. For now could you use the contact form? Cheers Peter

whatcd 10y ago

Love the pinch-to-zoom on this touch-screen Chromebook. It reminds me of Google Photo's!

jsilence 10y ago

Awesome UI! Does it support CalDAV?

wjoe 10y ago
+1 for CalDav support, currently it looks like it only works with Google Calendar. I've moved away from Google Calendar to self-hosted CalDAV, but there's a frustrating lack of good Calendar apps that support it. I'd like to give this a try!

dmvaldman 10y ago

the main view is all rendered in a <canvas> element... wow!

bschwindHN 10y ago
Honestly it was probably way easier (and more performant) to implement it that way. I would hate to wrangle DOM elements and CSS to get it to perform that smoothly and lay out in an expected and consistent way. I think most game developers would likely agree.

bobbles 10y ago

Are you planning an iOS native app? I would love this and would pay for it

petermolyneux 10y ago
Hi, glad you like it. Yes IPhone version is planned. But will be a few months yet. You could send me an email and I'll put you on the list.

DigitalJack 10y ago

Very slick. But something seems wrong with the two finger zoom (or I misunderstand it). It zooms, but it also scrolls a little... so the thing I was looking at will go off screen. For example if I have Sunday the 10th at the top of the screen, and I two finger scroll/zoom, I'm preplexed why the date at the top shifts to earlier or later dates. This happens both directions. Maybe it's intentional, but it's unexpected (for me). I either want to zoom or scroll, not both. I hope you take that as constructive. I really like it otherwise :)

petermolyneux 10y ago
Hi, I will try it out again. The zooming and scrolling should have been done to perfection, but maybe I've missed something. The two finger zoom is intended to follow your fingers vertically and ignore any horizontal movement.

cpeterso 10y ago

I can't scroll the page using my trackpad on Firefox because the scroll events seem to be captured by the simulated phone and not passed to the page.

chris_overseas 10y ago

This looks very promising, with a few improvements I can easily see this as my preferred calendar app. Feedback: Is it possible to selectively enable/disable individual calendars? I have a "birthday" calendar from a large social network that results in multiple birthdays each day completely dominating the calendar. If I can't turn that off, it's virtually unusable for me unfortunately. I tried to assign up for the Android beta but just received a confirmation email that I'd subscribed, no link to install the app. Is that to be expected? [Edit: I just received a download link in an additional email. Thanks!]

hacksonx 10y ago
Selecting a calendar allows you to access checkboxes that allow you to disable/enable subcalenders such as national holidays, birthdays and the main calendar.
petermolyneux 10y ago
Great, sorry it took some time. I wasn't really ready for all this response :)

bakul 10y ago

Very nice! One suggestion is to auto arrange to different number of columns based on the current time unit. Though zooming would get weird -- it would have folding/unfolding effect or snaky undulations! Not sure if this is possible but such "zooming" can have other uses....

ashitlerferad 10y ago

Anyone have a screenshot of this? (No JavaScript)

6nf 10y ago
What device do you use that doesn't allow you to enable js?
rplnt 10y ago
http://i.imgur.com/7J0wHPk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7J0wHPk.jpg These are two levels of zoom pictured, that's the idea basically - you can zoom and scroll on the "timeline".

dheera 10y ago

My biggest gripe with Google Calendar is the lack of consolidation of duplicate events. Often I have about 3-4 copies of various events and a storm of 10+ notifications for every appointment. If you can solve this problem, it would be a killer app for me.

fudged71 10y ago
FYI there is a chrome extension which solves this!
- 13hours 10y ago
  Do you have a link? I have many birthday duplicates on my Google Calendar for example.
  - fudged71 10y ago
    Found it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/event-merge-for-google-ca/idehaflielbgpaokehlhidbjlehlfcep?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/event-merge-for-go...

Vilkku 10y ago

Looks pretty nice. Some criticisms: * I dislike how the website hijacks scrolling, the phone doesn't fit on a Macbook 13" screen so I tried to scroll down, but that just scrolled in the app * When scrolling out to a view where I see many months at once it can only show a few events, in the demo it only shows Gym, and when I zoom in a bit more it also shows Hockey with kids. I feel these recurring events should have the lowest priority when zoomed out, it's more important to see "special" one-off events. * It's not clear that there are events hidden. When zoomed out a lot it's of course expected that this is the case, but when zoomed out a bit more it might be unclear if all events for a time period are visible or not.

petermolyneux 10y ago
Hi, thanks for the feedback. Sorry for hijacking the scroll, but it just had to be done :) Your second point on recurring events is good, I will look at that. Even more so the last point, that one is really important, but I haven't found a good way to solve it yet. Thanks /Peter
- josephcooney 10y ago
  Agree re: scrolling - it would have been difficult/impossible to get across the behaviour of the app in the is regard without hijacking.
- hn_user2 10y ago
  Perhaps heatmap showing number of events.
- danthejam 10y ago
  You could hijack the scroll only when the mouse is over the phone's screen not the entire page. Very interesting UI!
  - timjver 10y ago
    That's already what happens for me. I can scroll the page just fine if my cursor is off the demo device.

steinsgate 10y ago

Thanks for making this app. I had a similar idea too, but never executed it. Of course, the idea was based on a certain need. Often, I would have unscheduled events such as "talk to Santosh sometime next week" or "go on a short bike trip with Francesca next month". Basically events that have not been assigned a defined date and time. These are the events that I would like to see in the week view or month view (when I zoom out) so that I know that I need to find a specific time for it. The other events (which have a set date and time) receive lower priority in the zoomed out views. Have you thought of implementing something similar? Would be nice.

aruggirello 10y ago

Very nice and intuitive UI! Any thoughts about supporting ICS/VCS?

petermolyneux 10y ago

Hi everone, Thanks for all the great feedback. Anyone applying for Beta-testing will have to wait a few hours. Got my hand full :) Feel free to use the contact form for any questions or if you just want the IPhone version. Cheers, Peter

maxdesiatov 10y ago
Hi Peter, iPhone is written with lowercase "i", not uppercase. It is very worrying that wrong spelling is used on the site as well. I hope that application is much better than the spelling on the site. Thanks.
- blowski 10y ago
  If the worst thing about this product is that it doesn't follow Apple's brand guidelines, then it will be an excellent app. I agree that it's a bug but it's hardly "very worrying". The demo is excellent.

OJFord 10y ago

Nice! Reminds me of Spence & Apperley's bifocal display ('fisheye') calendar [1], but on a single axis. I remember thinking when I saw that in an HCI course a couple of years ago that despite being over 30 years old it was a better calendar app UX than anything available that I was aware of! [1] - see Fig. 6 of http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/r.spence/pubs/SA82.pdf http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/r.spence/pubs/SA82.pdf

yoz-y 10y ago

One thing I learnt from working on a calendar app is that the things which people want to see are seemingly very different from person to person. In the case of your calendar I would prefer if the events that happen on the same time would "expand" much sooner. In the example if you want to see both morning-briefing and my-breakfast-day you need to zoom in to a day view. I would much rather see these events one under another in the "week" zoom level, especially since there is a lot of free space available.

imdsm 10y ago

Does this integrate with my current calendar, say at Google?

philjackson 10y ago
The website heavily encourages connecting your Google calendar.

castell 10y ago

> By Peter Molyneux, Sweden Peter Molyneux, the designer of Black & White and Fable? Or just the same name?

soneca 10y ago

I synced it to my Google Calendar, but it imported all the events of my coworkers calendars that I subscribe to. It should have a way to remove it from view or not even import them at all.

alch- 10y ago
In the menu, you can manage which calendars are shown.

castell 10y ago

It reminds me of the WinFS "Journal" demo application.

alex95 10y ago

Why are you trying to re-invent something so simple as a calender? People have already adopted the typical calender, so where is the market to change the way it functions?

xavi 10y ago

Reminds me of DateLens http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/ http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/datelens/

kagamine 10y ago

When you add an event you scroll down, down, down. The final step is OK/Cancel and they are at the top of the page, centered. I can't reach those buttons with my thumb and have to use my other hand. They should be down at the bottom where the flow of the action ends, left and right justified. Edit. I think it could also benefit from a 'snap to now' button somewhere. I don't have time to use your fancy GUI for literally seconds of my life to see what's going on this morning. Just my 2c. Really nice app. (tu) I hope this doesn't come across as negative, I just want to help.

amelius 10y ago

Looks nice! I think this could be a really successful app! It would be nice if you could keep us (the HN crowd) updated on the business side of things.

adsche 10y ago

That's awesome! I have a suggestion: I love how when you tap a week number it zooms to that week. But I think it would be useful if it resets to the previous zooming if you tap it again.

andai 10y ago

Excellent app! I too am jealous you beat me to it. I just wanted to say one thing, you can make it open source, or wait until someone else does it.

yuchi 10y ago

I had that same exact idea years ago but didn’t finished it. Congrats, looks very, very promising.

cha-cho 10y ago

A very clever idea. The UX and the ease to onboard with the demo are both well executed. Congratulations!

doczoidberg 10y ago

Great app. I hope you will make apps via apache cordova from it and upload it to the app stores.

anotheryou 10y ago

Looks great, when it supports caldav (or uses the calender of my android which is synced via caldav by a 3rd party app) and otherwise keeps the information on my phone I'd happily jump in.

stared 10y ago

One point - when compressing the view I care for rare events (e.g. deadlines, conferences) not things like gym. So I would do the opposite of adding counts. (The same, when I do something daily and I compress days to a single line, I DO NOT want to see it.)

alch- 10y ago
I second that, recurring events aren't very interesting to me, and they crowd the view (even when just looking at today / this week). Would be great if they were somehow less prominent. Awesome work though, I love it!
DeadReckoning 10y ago
This is an excellent point, give priority to unique events over rare events when choosing what to display over a longer time interval

orkshaman 10y ago

Still hard to add new event

HeavyStorm 10y ago

Hey, you quit designing video games to make a calendar? Godus sucks, BTW.

blowski 10y ago
Different Peter Molyneux.

__d 10y ago

I like it! A few things that'd be really useful: - timezones when adding an event - and "floating" for eg. morning run - supporting different start and end timezones is really useful for plane flights - a second timezone shown on the left I use these things a lot currently (except for the separate start/end timezones cos no-one does that well, sadly)

edraferi 10y ago
Outlook does separate start and end timezones. It's still outlook though.

derflatulator 10y ago

Nice work. Love the UI, and general concept. My only criticism would be that the two vertical buttons/labels take up a fair chunk of the horizonal real estate. Perhaps just show the right one, and use strings such as "December 2015" and "22 Thurs (Dec)"?

vladharbuz 10y ago

I don't really understand how zooming works here — if I scroll up then down a bunch of times, I get really zoomed out and can't zoom back in. Additionally, the zooming mechanic could use some improvement, as it seems really jerky on my Macbook. Good idea, best of luck with it!

melbamorph 10y ago

I can't connect to my Google calendars. It just gives me the spinning circle then tells me failed to connect. When I look after it fails, it shows me my calendar list but it can't seem to display events. I have tried refreshing and disconnecting then connecting again but it gives the same error. I love this calendar concept and would love to give it a go. Any hints? I'm using chrome on my phone (Nexus5x).

antidaily 10y ago

Transitions feel very slow to me. If you can make that feel smoother and slicker, you're really onto something. Cool idea.

jere 10y ago

Nice! I had a very similar idea, which I made a small prototype for in a HCI course (click on the logo to get test data): http://humbit.com/longcal/ http://humbit.com/longcal/ The vision I had was a horizontal rather than vertical timeline and discrete rather than continuous zooming (though I thought a lot about implementing continuous scrolling). Yours might be the better way to do it, at least for mobile. In any case, I think existing calendar apps fall short. There's no support for planning anything that extends out of the current month. The absolute worst is when you're in the last week of the month and you don't even see things coming up in the next few days. Someone has a birthday and you don't even see it until it's too late. And what about planning things (trips, 30 day challenges, contracts) that last weeks or months? I even think that the shorter perspective affects our ability to do long term thinking.

visakanv 10y ago
Oh wow, I like this too. I have always wanted to have something like this for myself and my life. And I'd like to see the past populated with historical events, etc.
odbol_ 10y ago
This is why I use Google calendar in the special "4 week view". Always shows the current day at the top so do you only looking at the future.

hiergiltdiestfu 10y ago

I would prefer it as a true app instead of as a webapp. @OP, You mentioned an apk somewhere in the comments. Is it on an appstore? Couldn't find it on the Play Store.

sharkoz 10y ago

It looks awesome, but I have an error when I connect my google calendar. The header shows 'connexion failed', and the console says : appBundle.js:454 Uncaught QuotaExceededError: Failed to execute 'setItem' on 'Storage': Setting the value of 'oneview_allEvents' exceeded the quota. Maybe my calendars are too big ?

jegutman 10y ago

I've thought about hacking a calendar app for myself before. My pain points seemed very different. My main thing was being able to manage recurring events in a way that wasn't awful. I had a lot of recurring reminders to just take care of simple things during the week, but then I would go between time zones and some things would need to be shifted and other things fit an absolute time. Then I would go on vacation and some things needed to be snoozed on vacation but others were still important. I never really found a good solution from this. I just happen to be on sabbatical from working and have a new kid so my life just doesn't work the same way.

bluetidepro 10y ago

Slightly off topic, but do you know what I want? A calendar app that allows me to add events that don't have an end time. Sometimes I know when things will start, but don't care/know when it will end. Let me make the end time optional, and then just give me the alert when something happens. It's not like you get an alert when it ends. I don't get why any single calendar app I've ever used won't do this.

autarch 10y ago
On Google Calendar, you can make events that are 0 minutes long. That'll give you an alert when it starts.
girmad 10y ago
Many apps let you set 'reminders', which are effectively what you describe.

svmegatron 10y ago

I just want to add to the chorus of people saying they would pay for this. I too would be delighted to pay for this app. Looks AWESOME, thank you for creating it!

evo_9 10y ago

Very slick UI. A little sluggish if you zoom all the way out and then back in, but otherwise really nice man. Also (not that it matters), you misspelled 'hockey'.

choward 10y ago

Where is the source code?

Razengan 10y ago

I hope Apple hires you and makes this their default UI for the builtin Calendar app in next year's iOS/macOS. :)

brysgo 10y ago

I'm getting a 404 on http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/libs/jsWrappers.js http://app.oneviewcalendar.com/libs/jsWrappers.js Also, I get a QuotaExceededError for the key oneview_allEvents (Otherwise, I think this is really great! on android I can just add it to my homescreen and it feels almost like a native app)

NyxAGB 10y ago

Make it into an Android App and add Microsoft/Outlook calendar support and you got yourself your first customer. Hell even if it's only an I'd still be your first customer. On the more construction side it would be nice to have to see at what time an event takes place by just glancing and no only by clicking or taping on it.

wavelattice 10y ago

This is cool. A search function filter might be nice.

hurbledr 10y ago

Very cool prototype. Like many in this thread, I've been dreaming of a calendar app like this, something that I can pick up and use without having to read a bunch of documentation. It seems like most of the calendar programs I've tried to use succumbed to feature creep and ended up being feature rich but unwieldy, so it's refreshing to see such a simple, easy to use program. That being said, the one feature I could really use in a calendar app is to have a sort of ledger column that I could use for budgeting. As a person juggling multiple part-time jobs, it would be invaluable for me to be able to plug in my expected shifts for the week, get an estimate of how much my paycheck would be, and calculate that against my bills for the week/month/year.