InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Jibz on 2010/05/04 04:05

I am sorry, but despite the enticing subject this is not a concept for a new TV show but rather my first adventures with the IQ calendar

So .. I open the calendar, and it's on the current date in the week view (Tue 4th of May 2010). I wanted to go to September 3rd, so I clicked on the '4' in the navigation panel at the top where the tooltip read "Click to select date".

I moved to September and clicked '3', and to my surprise that immediately put me on August 30th. Ok, I thought, I'll just use the arrows to set the date and month instead. So I pressed the up arrow on "aug" to get to September, and that put me at September 27th. I pressed the down arrow on the day, which gave September 26th, I pressed it again which gave September 19th.

Now, there may be some special logic to how these buttons work, but personally I would have expected the date picker to set the date to what I pick, the arrows on month to not change the day, and the day arrows to move one day at a time instead of randomly 1 or 7.

Comments

you're in week view, so if you click September 4, the toolbar will show you August 30, which is the beginning of the week where you'd find September 4.

If you look at the calendar, you'll see what I mean : September 4 is a Sunday at the end of the week starting with August 30.

If you choose the "day view", you won't have that problem.

Maybe would you prefer the date in the toolbar to not show the beginning of the week ?

Hi Jibz,

Sorry the calendar proved confusing. You have to remember that the view, ie. Week or Month or Day will govern some of this so let's say you were in week view w today showing. I would take the following steps:

1. Click on the month icon to go to month view

2. move month forward to that month, i.e. September in your case

3. Click on the date in September, i.e. 3rd in your case

Does this help explain the calendar & what you want to do?

Thank you both, that at least cleared up why it is doing this

[quote=Armando]Maybe would you prefer the date in the toolbar to not show the beginning of the week ?[/quote]

Yes, I would certainly prefer that. When I pick a date with the date picker I expect it to show that date with the containing week in the view. And when I press the up and down arrows on the month I expect the day to stay the same.

The problem here is there is no consistency. If I press the month name and select the next month from the drop down it does not change the day.

If you use the date picker to select a date in the week currently displayed it shows that date and not the first day of the week.

If I go to month view and select a date with the date picker it goes to that date and not the first day of the month/week.

If you press Today (May 4th) and then next month and previous month 3 times (up, down, up, down, up, down) you end up at April 18th .. nowhere close to today or even this week.

If you press Today (May 4th), then press up to go to the next month and then press Today again you end up with May 9th, the last day of this week

I know you've probably been using this program for a long time and all these idiosyncrasies become transparent to you and you use your workarounds, but you have to look at this from a new users perspective .. I am sorry but the date appears to be jumping around randomly

I actually never use the calendar... Not yet.

But I agree that this is a bit weird -- somewhat logical, but weird from the user's and UI perspective.

What do others think ? It's important since the calendar is THE very next thing on the roadmap. Hopefully we can get a bit of feedback on that one.

Until the topic appeared here I had forgotten just how annoying and unintuitive the date picker is. Luckily date filtering is not something I need much and my calendar use is more experimental than essential - for now. As Jibz rightly points out, the seemingly simple task of moving by one month or even one day at a time results in the aptly described "Date Roulette".

John

[quote=Armando]

What do others think ?

[/quote]

I've migrated over to daily use of the calendar. (It is really nice)

I'm used to the datefilter toolbar (after working on Date Filter toolbar , and can use it readily, but I prefer the "ItemCreated > now-10 and ItemCreated < now" type of usage in the grids. I hope that's in the nearterm calendar plan.

Keith, the link isn't working for me. ??

[quote=jan_rifkinson]

Keith, the link isn't working for me. ??

[/quote]

I just tried it, and it's working here.

I think that the display should be logical and consistent. The user is going to expect it to stay at the same day/time when click forward a week, month or year.

For example, select 8am for today. Then click the day up arrow 5-6 times. First the time goes off then after several clicks it comes back on and starts going up. This is similar to the day. It just sort of gets lost in scrolling/selecting. Users will get used to how ever it is defined (though they will expect it to work like outlook) but it has to be consistent.

Mantis :

0965

Calendar toolbar : should be more "consistent" (e.g. : defined dates shouldn't automatically change according to the time scale)