I recently dedicated a good portion of my time improve the calendar views. Initially I wanted to solve a nasty regression bug dealing with overlapping events, but as I delved into the quite monolithic code I got entangled by other issues that caught my attention.
For example I found it not so easy to keep track of all the shadow elements of the event boxes. Also I noticed – certainly like other users too – that the shadows sometimes seem to be sort of tattered at the corners. For this reason I was not too annoyed when Christian (our UI expert) told me that he already had in mind to change the appearance of the shadows anyway. So our common idea was remove the current shadow elements and only denote a slight shadow with a 1Pixel border around the events. I am currently working on this.
As we have discussed on our last F2F meeting in Hamburg we wanted to improve the look and feel of the calendar views in various respects. From the design point of view the decorated view header has the greatest backlog. Christian and me are working on this (Bug 444292). Christian also is currently heavily engaged to modernize the styling of the calendar views that spread a flair of the last century.
So I can promise you that you will hear and see more about the calendar views in the coming weeks even though we are approaching the final round of our 0.9 roadmap. One last note about the monolithic code: I won’t change too much about this shortly, although it is certainly better for the project in the long run if we do this. But with the lack of a compiler I have developed a certain respect for such challenges…
Thanks for this first heads up for the current areas of focus in Calendar! I especially appreciate the bugzilla links to satisfy our curiosity for reading fodder ;-)
I encourage you and the other devs to keep going – thanks Berend and Simon!
Yeah! Keep going. This is, generally, excellent piece of work which is really, really helpful.
I am pleased to see that “task mode in Sunbird” was discussed. Thank you Berend, Simon, et al for keeping this on the table.
Although I switched back to Outlook for the time being (due to the lack of proper address handling and – above all – sync possibilities with my smartphone) I still follow the lightning development closely and really appreciate your new attitude towards community relations! I can’t wait to switch back, because outlook has so many drawbacks after using TB and Lightning from v0.3…
Thank you for your commitment!
I really appreciate the discussed UI reviews of the calendar views. Especially the one issue referred to as “CSS improvement (bring Grid to 2008)”.
How and where can I keep track of the latest developments, drafts etc.? The wiki only shows old drafts. Which bugs keep track of this? Thanks.