[Design] 0.6 dogfood feedback

[Stefan Magdalinski]

I was speaking to Ted at Search Champs, and he suggested that I try out
0.6 and give some feedback here.

I have no idea what the plans are, the etiquette is, or if this is the
wrong forum for this kind of feedback. This is just my impressions from
a couple of hours playing.

I'd like to join in, because ical makes me more miserable on a daily
basis than any other program apart from Outlook.

Overall: not bad, expected it to be less capable. Obviously I'm not
going to comment on performance at this point. Seemed to import my ical
diary fine, which was great.

This was tested on OS X 10.4

Otherwise, here's a list of bulleted issues, mostly interface suggestions.

1. Date and time formats need to follow from the OS preferences. Here in
  Old Europe, our days come before our months.

2. better hints of what's a button and what isn't. I'm thinking
especially of the grey icons at the top of the event entry tab - they
don't mean anything to me, and grey means 'greyed out'

3. Keyboard navigation. I don't use a mouse unless forced to- they hurt
my hands. The more keyboard shortcuts you can do the better.

Add keyboard navigation and an shortcut for 'New Event' and I'll start
seriously using it.

4. Event entry. This action needs to be as quick as possible - I often
do this when I've got someone on the phone, I'm in hurry, and in ical I
always end up shoving the wrong things in the wrong fields because the
tab order is illogical - make adding entries slick and simple and the
application will rock.

Think about how people think when they tab their way through it. I
actually quite like Palm Desktops dialog based model for this: New
event, tab through the details, hit return. quick, simple.

Suggestion: Also apply a bit of dumb-but-looks-like-smart pattern
matching to the entry of dates and times to give me shortcuts: if I
enter something like '9-11a' in the time  box, figure out that I meant
10-11am. I don't think i have ever in my life arranged a meeting to the
nearest minute, and the  chances are that I'm trying to add this event
in the next 12 months, so forgive me for not stating 2006 or 2007.

5. I would love a compressed view - my diary is sometimes quite sparse,
there is no reason to give me a sea of whitespace or make me run
fullscreen to see that I have both a 9am meeting and an 8pm dinner with
nothing in between. at worst, indicate visually at the bottom or top of
the viewport if there are events out of view. (ical is awful at this - I
sometimes miss appointments because it doesn't show them)

6. A view that is just a list of the days events (like the task view)
would possibly meet the requirement for 5.

7. Recurrent events - Palm Desktop again strikes I think the right
balance of simplicity and flexibility with regard to recurrent events -
many things occur, say, monthly, but on the first saturday - not
necessarily on the same day of the month. I couldn't see a way to
express this.

that'll do for now... more later.

I hope this was useful rather than objectionable.

stef