As a slight side-note, after my lengthy response to the initial functionality suggestion, I use a paper diary and paper calendar. I’ve never found smartphone calendars convenient. Too clunky adding/editing/navigating the information. Editing from Mudita Center, with some sort of import/export functionality that allowed me to put the events into other software (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, but others might use Google or Microsoft), would most-likely make me adopt the calendar function of my cellphone as my primary organising device.
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I discovered yesterday a feature in Google Calendar that I like but that I did not list above:
- Specify different time zones for the start time and stop time
This is handy, for example, for someone flying from one time zone to another.
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@nyloncake I’ve reported this to the devs.
I know we are working on implementing a FULL calendar app, but I asked if this can be fixed sooner.
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Personally, to me it is important:
- to easily browse through this weeks events by:
-
fitting quite a bit more info onto the screen than usual, avoiding the experience to have to go back and forth trough screens all the time(maybe not, see edit) -
previewing all of a day’s events (truncating the descriptive text) with start (and end) times, together with the selected day from the calendar’s month view(maybe not, see edit) - providing the option to use a fast repaint of the display
-
- provide fields in a GUI for creating an event by:
- repeating the event every X weeks on LIST days (I work two shifts)
- setting up a repeating yearly event (birthdays)
- to be able to synchronize with CalDAV servers through vdirsyncer considering these known RFC standards deviations
edit: actually, I’d rather like the calendar’s month view to indicate the amount of events on each day with a dot, which would help me pick days I’d like to view events of:
here’s how my recurring work schedule calendar may look like:
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//test//NONSGML test 4.3//EN
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Europe/Brussels
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZNAME:CET
TZOFFSETFROM:+0000
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
DTSTART:19761231T230000
RDATE:19761231T230000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZNAME:CEST
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0200
DTSTART:19810329T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=3
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZNAME:CEST
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0200
DTSTART:19770403T020000
RDATE:19770403T020000
RDATE:19780402T020000
RDATE:19790401T020000
RDATE:19800406T020000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZNAME:CET
TZOFFSETFROM:+0200
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
DTSTART:19790930T030000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;UNTIL=19961027T030000;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=9
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZNAME:CET
TZOFFSETFROM:+0200
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
DTSTART:19971026T030000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZNAME:CET
TZOFFSETFROM:+0200
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
DTSTART:19770925T030000
RDATE:19770925T030000
RDATE:19781001T030000
RDATE:19950924T030000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20221003T120000Z
CREATED:20221003T120000Z
UID:lateshift@mudita.com
LAST-MODIFIED:20221003T120000Z
DESCRIPTION:work late shift including commute
SUMMARY:late shift
RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;INTERVAL=2;BYDAY=MO,TU,WE,TH,FR
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Brussels:20221003T120000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Brussels:20221003T230000
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20220926T040000Z
CREATED:20220926T040000Z
UID:earlyshift@mudita.com
LAST-MODIFIED:20222609T040000Z
DESCRIPTION:work early shift including commute
SUMMARY:early shift
RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;INTERVAL=2;BYDAY=MO,TU,WE,TH,FR
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Brussels:20220926T040000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Brussels:20220926T150000
TRANSP:OPAQUE
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
I’m not sure how my old Nokia or Samsung devices store these recurring events, but when editing, there’s always an option to “edit all” or “edit one” instance.
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Yeah I agree I am surprised on all three phones, mudita, light phone and punkt how there is a calendar but its useless because you can’t put reminders in it. Yes there is a notes app but I want alarms that go off to remind me of things
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The calendar function is actually quite difficult to implement .
Calendaring is really hard to code. That’s right, I’m putting this out there: Writing code for calendaring features is hard.
Although coding is difficult to begin with, calendaring is particularly tricky. Just to be clear- I’m not an expert on coding or programing, but after countless meeting with our tech team about the calendar feature, I’ve learned it’s really complicated. For something so seemingly simple and intuitive to humans, the interaction of dates & times, and timestamps & time zones, has proven to be quite difficult in a minimalistic, striped-down operating system.
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I have written software in more than 25 programming languages (at which point I stopped counting). As someone who has programmed dates & times recently in JavaScript (e.g., with Moment.js) and Python (with various modules), I agree that this is one of the most complicated aspects of software development.
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@kirkmahoneyphd Thank you for saying this. Sometimes end-users don’t really realize how difficult a feature is to implement, despite hours & hours of programming.
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Agreed. However, you guys and the Light team have a valid reason. You are doing it from the ground up as you are coding it in a FreeRTOS fork and developing specifically for this device and the Light team with LightOS running on top of android which sounds easier, but connecting seamlessly is hard. Punkt has Android and could just re-skin an open-source calendar project to make it work seamlessly. Shoot, they could just give access to install apk’s that look good on the phone and it should be good. But I understand the resources and experience is just not there. Keep working at it though!
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@kirkmahoneyphd @urszula Could we consider a temporary reminder alarm for notes with a disclaimer that it doesn’t support timezones? The use case would be to set up a one-time alarm at an offset smaller than a week, i.e. remind me {in 2 days/saturday} at 14h, and it would simply use the current time known to the device.
3 Likes
For me I would love to have sync not only with Google but also iCloud and other Services. And Additionally to that being able to Manage my Calendar over the Mudita Center!
Most Functions were already mentioned, like recurring events, Reminders and so on.
For me I would love to change the Views (Month, Week, Daily) and change the Calendar standard first day to Monday and not Sunday. Also being able to set different categories and View Events filtered by certain category.
This is my “Wish-List”
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Syncing would be great, but I would settle for a simple calendar which I could update in Mudita Center and then I can see my events on the Mudita Pure. Surely, that’s not too complicated? Or it it?
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@valleygirl Thanks for this idea. I will pass this on to the team. Sometimes, even when things seem simple, they might be a bit mor complicated than we think. But I will definitely pass it on.
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While syncing or alarms could be harder to do, or require Internet (Mudita Center?) I doubt is a simple “event note” reminder in calendar so hard to do (in existing app?) = just reminder appearing, no connection to alarm needed.
Even less then that, adding text on certain date one could see as date mark and then see more by clicking on date, would be most helpful.
Code could be transferred to newer models, so is not that much of a loss or distraction. If this is situation with calendar app for future phones too, question will be popping again.
2 Likes