Calendar:Calendar View

Lightning Calendar View Proposal

State: Draft
Author: Christian Jansen
Last Change: April 5, 2006

The calendar view is the most prominent part of Lightning. Users have direct access to several panes. These are:

• A Calendar Pane containing
  • An One Day View
  • A Work Week View
  • A Week View
  • A Month View
  • And probably a Year View
• A Month Pane containing a control called Mini Month for providing an overview about a whole month.
• The Calendar Subscription Pane gives users an overview about calendar subscriptions and about users own calendar(s).
• The Agenda Pane provides a cumulative view of To-Dos & Events for the current day.
• The To-Do Pane lists the To-Dos of today, the upcoming days & weeks.

Figure 2 gives an impression how the Calendar could look like.

Details of each pane, and other window elements are described in detail in the sections below. The figure below shall provide an overview where each pane is located.

Overview where each pane is located

General Thoughts

The Calendar View provides a dynamic layout, thus each pane can be scaled in size. Each pane can be closed. This applies not to the main Calendar Pane.

Mini Month Pane

The Mini Month Pane comprises as minimum one Mini Month

Lightning Mini Month

Resizing the Mini Month Pane shows up additional Mini Months.

+----------------+  +----------------+
| < March 2006   |  | April 2006  >  |
|  S M D M D F S |  |  S M D M D F S |
|  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |  |  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |
|  ...           |  |  ...           |
+----------------+  +----------------+
+----------------+  +----------------+
|   June 2006    |  |   July 2006    |
|  S M D M D F S |  |  S M D M D F S |
|  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |  |  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |
|  ...           |  |  ...           |
+----------------+  +----------------+

The title bar of the Mini Month Pane provides information about the time zone specified in Lightning

• A double click on the Time Zone info may open a Time Zone Config dialog

The Mini Month

A Mini Month should allow to:

• Jump with one click from one month to another
• Direct access to different days
• Direct access to different months
• Direct access to different years
• Jump with one click to the current day
• Highlighting of the current day
• Highlighting of the current week
• Highlighting of the current month
• Highlighting of the current year
• Highlighting of days containg an event
• It should allow to preview parts of the privious and the next month
• It should reflect first day of the week configurations:

e.g: "Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun" or "Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat"

• The control should not change its size while switching between months.

The Year Panel

The Year Panel can be reached by clicking the Month & Year area of the Mini Month. The panel allows users to navigate from one year to another by using the left or right buttons.

In addition it should be possible to navigate quickly to a specific month within the next 12 month from the current month on.

The panel should indicate month which relate to the previous or the next year differently.

The figure below shows a proposal of the Year Panel.

Calendar Subscription Pane

The Calendar Subscription Pane lists all subscribed calendars. Subscribed calendars can be stored locally or remotely. The graphical representation should be in both cases the same.

From the Pane users should have the possibility to

• Publish calendars
• Subscribe calendars
• Create calenders
• Create calendars groups
• Manually update subscribed calenders
• Notify users that a calendar has been published
• Switch visibility of calendars on or off
• Delete calendars
• Move calendars from one group to another

Creation and the subscription of calendars shaould also be intergrated into the menus & maybe in the tool bar.

The figure below shows a rough sketch of the Calendars & Groups

+-------------------------+
| My Calendars          X |
+-------------------------+
|     [X] [Green ] Work   |
| [+] [X] [Blue  ] Fares  |
| [-] [X] [Red   ] Team   |
|     [X] [Black ] Jeff   |
|     [X] [Mauve ] Bob    |
|     [X] [Yellow] Lisa   |
+-------------------------+

The figure below gives a more detailed impression of the features set which is needed for creating, subscribing, and publishing calendars.