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Show HN: Summarize your time availability in seconds
- jonathancai11 6y agoHey guys, when people ask to schedule a meeting/interview/whatever, I've always found it hard to respond with a list of time availabilities. I always tabbed back and forth between my Google calendar to construct a message that accurately listed my free time, but this was painful. My site helps me do this small task, and I wanted to see if anyone else had this same problem, had some feedback for me, or if there were any other simple solutions and I've wasted my time building this crap. Note: I've yet to have my app verified by Google, so if you wish to import your own Google calendar on to my site, the consent screen will look sketchy.
- throwaway888abc 6y agoHandy, bookmarked, thank you
- smashpanda 6y agoFound I have the same issue. Customer facing folks have it even worse. As much as I love the solution what I really want is a cli that’ll spit out my meetings OR my free time. I.e I could say: cli --free 60m —today And it would spit out the 60 minute chunks (in my time zone). Would love to copy paste that but not sure how hard it would be to do with the google api
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jonathancai11 6y agoSounds like a cool idea too!
- awake 6y agohere is the api you want. I use this to auto schedule my todos from a plain text file to my calendar https://developers.google.com/calendar/v3/reference/freebusy/query https://developers.google.com/calendar/v3/reference/freebusy...
- smashpanda 6y agoMost excellent, thank you. My biggest blocker to getting started was the setup of a “google app”. Getting a token and all that. Is it fairly straightforward to start making rest calls? I’d love to just hit that api
- emilburzo 6y agoDo you have your script/tool published anywhere?
- zabil 6y agoThis is a real problem, especially across time zones and people who schedule a lot of meetings. I'd like to add people to a meeting and choose the best time based on free slots on their calendar.
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks for the feedback! That's definitely ideal. Effectively when2meet integrated with Google Calendar. Might be down the pipeline if enough people interested
- moltar 6y agoThe title confused me. I thought the summary would expressed in seconds, like Unix epoch time.
- __initbrian__ 6y ago+1 I was thinking the same thing. Maybe an alternative title "Show HN: Quickly summarize your availability"
- netsharc 6y agoSame here, I thought it'd be a productivity tool that would rapidly count down and make me aware "You only have this many seconds left budgeted for [_____]". I was looking for the "Go!" button I thought I'd have to click after adding at least 1 thing to the calendar.
- jonathancai11 6y agoApologies for the false advertisement
- abrichr 6y agoCongrats on shipping! I've been thinking about building something similar to scratch my own itch. I think ideally it would generate availability for an arbitrary time span, e.g a week. Also, I didn't end up trying it due to the sketchy consent screen you mentioned. Maybe there's a lower friction way to get someone's schedule, e.g. screenshot?
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks! And yeah, a part of me wishes I waited for Google verification to post.. I'm too impatient for their "4-6 weeks"
- __initbrian__ 6y agoCool project! Great work. I think this perfectly fits the send me your availability niche. When working with groups, I've used when2meet[0] [0] https://www.when2meet.com/ https://www.when2meet.com/
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks! Yeah, this definitely doesn't solve the group scheduling problem like when2meet does. I think its also a bit frustrating to tab back and forth between my Google calendar page and the when2meet event to fill it out, maybe they should integrate also!
- hantusk 6y agolike https://doodle.com/ https://doodle.com/
- somehelpful 6y agoI get off-my-one for the month (3/30 for today, 30th of April) in Safari on iOS
- jonathancai11 6y agoYou are right! Can't believe I didn't notice this until now.. I'll take a look. Thanks for pointing this out!
- jonathancai11 6y agoFixed.. Apparently Javascript Date objects index months by 0. Stupid on my part for not noticing until now
- saagarjha 6y agoProbably stole it from Java, which does the same thing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lihaciudaniel 6y agoLooks good I don't think anyone would care about my schedule
- zvr 6y agoInteresting -- congrats on building it! Further possible enhancements: - more timezones - week starting on Monday - hide weekend - every generated time is a link to timeanddate/worldclock/something that can automatically convert it to other timezones
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks for the feedback! 1. Added some more timezones, but not yet comprehensive I guess 2. Added work_week option for desktop 3. Same as 2 4. Maybe in the future? But I think my original goal was to avoid links so you can send self-contained availabilities in an email to someone
- netsharc 6y agoOn the topic of week starts, US calendars is funny because it starts on Sunday. European calendars start on Monday. In some Muslim countries they have Fridays, Saturdays off, and I guess they work again on Sunday. Welcome to dealing with time! I'm sure you've also read: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... . I guess a logical option would be to have 2 options: "Start week on [Weekday]" (using a dropdown chooser) and "Show [n] days" (some people maybe want a 6-day week, and others just a 3-day one!). I noticed the "Copy" button generates a copy-pastable text. I was half expecting an encoded URL that one could share with people, they'd open this URL in their browser and see what the user just entered. For me at least it's easier to see a graphical calendar rather than trying to parse entries like "Friday May 1, 8:00-10:00." The data doesn't even have to be stored server-side, you could encode the times and generate a URL with a "#", which the app would then decode so it could render the calendar with the markings.
- jonathancai11 6y agoThe article looks interesting, I'll have a read in a bit. Also, the URL to send the encoded calendar is a great idea! I've thought about doing that before, but focused on just creating the message because I thought users would rather just get the text and be done with the site, but I think I'll implement it and see if people use it
- cuddlybacon 6y agoAll I see is a blank white page on Safari 13.1 EDIT: It's been fixed.
- adrianpike 6y agoYeah, I'm getting a 404 on some assets on Chrome. :(
- jonathancai11 6y agoReally sorry, I deployed using Google App Engine, trying to resolve this now... :(
- cuddlybacon 6y agoGave it another shot, and it seems fine now. :)
- jaflo 6y agoI like this a lot (was actually thinking of building something similar)! Some feedback I have: - When I log in with my Google account, my name is shown as undefined ("Hi, undefined!"). - It would be nice to quickly select/unselect all of my calendars (I have a lot, but only one I really need to use). - It would be cool to select a date range and then ask it to spit out all availabilities based on my calendar without needing to manually select available times. Although I like the current opt-in way too. Just a thought, maybe no change is needed here.
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks so much for the feedback! 1. What browser are you using? I haven't gotten that before, so interested to see whats causing that 2. I definitely want to add that as a feature soon. 3. And yeah I've seen another app calendar.management do that, but I've found opt-in to make more sense imo. Something to consider in the future though
- jonathancai11 6y agoWhen I pull calendars from Google's API, I now set them visible based on your own visibility settings, should fix #2?
- jaflo 6y ago1. This happens to me in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. I get an error related to something being blocked by CSP, maybe that's it? 2. I saw your other comment and yes, that fixes it!
- jonathancai11 6y ago1. Thank you for trying it out on those browsers - never thought someone would care enough to test it like this! Nonetheless, I really have no idea what's causing that.. I guess as long as the Google calendar events load in correctly its not a big deal? 2. Cool!
- GuB-42 6y agoVery nice, here is a suggestion: 24-hour clock I've seen you suggest time zones from all over the world, which is nice. But the AM/PM system is mostly an American thing, a 24-hour clock is more common elsewhere. I suppose you can query the browser for the appropriate format to use like you are doing for the time zone.
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks for the feedback! Totally forgot 24-hr clock was a thing, will add that as a option asap
- jonathancai11 6y agoAdded
- ken 6y agoMinor nit: the PM/24 toggle seems to only be for the output text, and doesn't affect the timeline selection scale.
- jonathancai11 6y agoI'll see if I can do something about this, I am using react-big-calendar
- siquick 6y agoBrit living in Australia here - AM/PM is standard in both these places too. Must be an anglo thing.
- p0llard 6y ago24h clock is pretty common in the UK; definitely wouldn't say AM/PM is standard at all in my experience.
- boldlybold 6y agoIs there a reason why overlapping blocks are not extended into a single block? With a few clicks and drags you can create a mess of a schedule.
- jonathancai11 6y agoYes that is definitely a feature I can add in. I don't think I gave the instruction anywhere but you can delete an availability by clicking on it also. That should help the clutter
- jonathancai11 6y agoAdded!
- wjdp 6y agoNeat, could see myself using this. Couple of things: - After placing a timeslot I went to drag it up and down. Instead it created another timeslot within the first one. Having used Google calendar a lot I kept subconsciously trying this: http://i.imgur.com/G9SlRAh.png http://i.imgur.com/G9SlRAh.png - Showing timezone is great but the dates are in the US MM/DD format. For everyone else this really throws us, especially when the date is ambiguous. DD/MM really should be the default outside the US. Also perhaps an option for the ISO YYYY-MM-DD format.
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks! 1. Yep, definitely an issue, I'm gonna try to have adjacent availabilities just combine into each other (also you can delete availabilities by clicking on them!) 2. I had not thought about that but that is something I'll fix soon also
- jonathancai11 6y agoAdded DD/MM and combining availabilities
- wjdp 6y agoAmazing!
- mfontani 6y agoI like it because it has many toggles, some of which are "cute". By default, it suggests a date/time for today on "5/1", and there doesn't seem to be a toggle for that. In most of the world, that's not the first of May: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country Would it be possible to make the date format also a toggle or a cusomisable option?
- jonathancai11 6y agoThank you for the feedback! Do you mean M/D vs D/M? I believe I've added that to the output formatting as another toggle
- c-smile 6y agoThat's telling: https://whattime.today/static/media/peep1.5d348a4f.png https://whattime.today/static/media/peep1.5d348a4f.png
- jonathancai11 6y agoWhat do you mean by that?
- bobblywobbles 6y agoThis is a neat app, thanks for creating it and hosting it for us to use.
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks for checking it out!
- newswasboring 6y agoI clicked on the site without reading your opening comments. It took me a couple of minutes to understand what the purpose is. I think I would not have given it that much time if it was not a Show HN. But then again its such a specialized tool that if someone finds it they will perhaps know how to use it. I don't know, maybe add a button somewhere for a simple explanation? Also the title says "What time today?" but actually the default calendar which shows up is the work week. That seems like mixed messages. Here is something I think will be cool, make the "What time ______?" as a drop down. So it goes "what time this week/day/work week?" etc. Some people might find it cheesy though.
- jonathancai11 6y agoThanks for the feedback. I was trying to go for simplicity/intuitiveness but I definitely was not successful haha. I may add a howto button or something like you suggest. And the title idea is cool! I'll see if that could work
- newswasboring 6y agoI certainly don't think you failed. Once I got what the purpose is, then its quite easy to understand the interface. I don't organize too many meetings, so I don't run into this problem too often.
- smashpanda 6y agoI instantly got it. Maybe you don’t schedule a lot of meetings. I have to schedule 3 meetings on avg a day _I think_. Constant pita
- newswasboring 6y agoYes that can be it. For me other people organize meetings with me and for that they can just look at my outlook calendar.
- jonathancai11 6y ago
- tradertef 6y agoIt would be nice if somehow outlook calendar can be imported as well.
- jonathancai11 6y agoDefinitely! I'm a bit biased in trying to solve my GCal issues first, but if there's some more requests for outlook I can work on importing them
- garyrichardson 6y agoI need the following calendar states: - Free - Out of Office - Busy - Busy, but I can definitely reschedule this for the right reason As someone with a very active calendar I often tell people "My calendar is up to date, but for this I'm also available at x, y, z if it works for you" But I guess that depends on incorporate who's asking and what they are asking for..
- jonathancai11 6y agoI guess I don't take enough meetings to need this type of complexity, but I'll add this feature to the icebox!