We posted our first public preview of the new calendar: a short video showing some of the things we think make it easier to work on under the hood:
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18 Comments
Hi the calendar is looking great! The drag and drop and the zooming capabilities have been asked for many times at my workplace. I was wondering if within the same idea of dragging and dropping, I have seen in some other solutions the ability to drag the appointment in order to change the length of time also… possibly even over the length of day multiple days? Looks like it could work in the same lines somehow like in the vid where you drag the bar to resize the viewing area of the appointments with no start time?
We have a Pro Complete version as we need to use our database for project management also… I know it will be released on a later date but have a little suggestion list below:
The above suggestion for dragging to change the length of time would be helpful for scheduling in the gantt chart also.
We had to do a lot of customization on our current pro complete for the gantt chart to be able to keep track of multiple jobs and multiple milestones and deadlines (i.e. we often have up to 20 active jobs running simultaneously)… could that be included by default in the new version also? Because the chart is designed really for one project at a time it isn’t really used that much here yet as when we throw multiple projects at it it becomes very unwieldy…
Because of the volume of jobs we are running, would it be possible in the gantt chart to have a ‘collapsible’ view.. i.e showing all the jobs simultaneously, but when clicking on a specific job, it ‘expanding'(with it’s subtasks) whilst keeping the other jobs collapsed?
If you need another beta tester please let me know!
Love the “collapse” idea; and I’ll definitely take you up on your offer to be on the beta team once the version with gantt charts takes form. In the mean time, I’d love to see some screen shots of the modifications you’ve made to the gantt chart. If you get a chance, please send me some more details about what you’ve done to john at seedcode.com
Thanks for the feedback!
I know this has just been touched upon, but I was about to a similar question.
On the schedule view, along with the title can each schedule accomodate extra details of the appointment within the space allocated to the appointment, like in detailed view of the current version, or is it limited to the first line only?
P.S Theres no way to scroll this page in internet explorer (I know get a better browser) but I thought you may want to know.
At the moment, I have to select the text and drag to force it to scroll.
Currently limited to the first line, the rest would have to be seen through tooltips… though I was able to add a scroll bar to this page for you Steve.
John, It looks great! I am very excited about the drag and drop. I have been thinking about implementing this based on tips that I have read. I have a few questions: The movie showed the time on the left to be from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm. I noticed in the Filters tab that there was a place to set the Earliest time and time scale increment. What are the increment choices and what is the maximum number of time slots available. Is this something that would be easily modifiable?
Can you explain the sources tab, please?
I noticed that all of the appointment descriptions (titles) in the demo were all on the first line of the time block regardless of how long the appointment. Is the title or description limited to one line?
I am curious about the simple day and week views. Can you share a screen shot so that I can get an idea of what they look like?
I look forward to using the final product. Do you need a beta tester?
Here is an example of one of the simple views: simple week view. Hope that helps.
Hey David! Would love to have you beta… I’ll send an email to you directly. As for your questions…
Time Scale. The increment choice is now 5min, 15min, 20min, 30min, hour and, on the grid view, day. Though this can be modified by you in just one place: your post inspired me to create a 12 hour increment just for fun: pretty cool.
Maximum Number of Rows. That is all you my friend. We have 36 rows now. If you have a big monitor, or want to scroll, you can change this in our configuration script. (Fewer rows is also an option.)
Titles. Yes, the titles only show in the first row (though we have a tool tip on them if you can’t see the whole thing).
“Simple views”. These are just a portal of events without the time scale at the left (so each event appears right below the one above it, regardless of how much time separates them). This is how the day view of our current calendar works. I’ll show this in subsequent movie.
Sources Tab. Ah, my favorite feature. I’ll post separately on this but for now, know that the calendar can show data from more than one source in the same view (the same month view for example). So you can have one source that is your events table, and another that is your HR table with employee review dates: the sources tab lets you toggle which sources are shown at a given time.
By the way, these sources can be FileMaker tables or iCal URLs.
Hi John:
This is really exciting. As you know, I have done a significant amount of damage — I mean, customization (:)) — to the current Pro Complete, in adapting it for our medical practice. Will I still be able to paste in this incredibly cool new calendar?
You have done a lot of work customizing that. So you’ll be able to paste in the calendar alright, and since it can use your existing appointments table, you’re good there to. Interestingly, a lot of the work you’ve done was to make the Appointment Mini Window a real form layout in its own right, and that is now anticipated in the new calendar, so you’ll be able to (wait for it…) use your existing Appointment Mini Window layout, provided you add the “refresh” scripts from our calendar to your “continue” buttons.
It looks really good, but I’m curious how you handle repeating events. Can you reschedule a repeating event (i.e. current and all future events)? How are conflicts resolved? Can repeating events be open-ended or do they require an end date or finite number of occurrences? I’m concerned about file bloat if each occurrence requires its own record.
Thank you.
Those are good (and tough) questions Larry. We’re currently planning to handle repeats the way we do in the current calendar– present an interface to describe the repeat frequency (3rd Tuesday of the Month, etc.) and then blow those out to separate records. These separate records would be tied together so you could perform batch operations (like rescheduling) against them (or against all future repetition), though you could also elect to modify just one of the repetitions. (Bit tricky to know when to exempt a modified repetition from the batch operations applied to others.)
As you suggest, this requires an end date or number of repts and does add records to the file (though aren’t these going to become records anyway, once the event gets notes, an outcome, a status, etc.)
(Look for a separate post on conflicts soon)
So I’d like to just be able to encode the repetition frequency, as iCal does, but I think having real records gets us further at little cost. What do you think?
WOW ! Im impressed
I guess ill be waiting in line for this to be released… hopefully with an upgrade path from my current Pro Dev Complete licence
I love the auto resizing month view, does the daily scheduler view perform in the same manner ?
Yep, all the cal tabs resize like that. (thanks Steve!)
Will this be available on stand-alone copies? We do not have (nor do we intend to have) server. Small business (4 seats and a master) and just hook up to main machine remotely. I have been looking at every solution available and have not found anything satisfactory except server versions which is too big a deal for me to implement at this point.
If the pricing is reasonable, and it works with iPhone, then you have an instant customer. We are always on the road, and need a central repository of appointments, that we can access via iPhone or Web (remote).
Thanks
Al
Stand-alone copies, sure: you’ll be able to share this peer-to-peer as you can with the FileMaker databases you have now. Though looking forward I think any iPhone / iCal integration will require server. Unless the data you’re tracking is truly trivial you just need server if you’re using FMP: crash protection, scheduled backup, and the gateways needed for iPhone / iCal.
Bring it on! Currently Reactor is being touted as the be all and end all for calendars in FMp….but it is obtuse!…so with drag and drop, which is the feature of Reactor which most people see as ‘wonderful’, we have a real alternative. Reaction speed is also important. We need this NOW!
We’ve done some work with using the existing Calendar as a fully fledged actions/activity system rather than a simple date/time calendar and it’s working quite well in that type of mode.
By the way the demo movie does not load wide enough, it is cut off by the forced width of your website…makes it difficult to see the full affect having to scroll right and left all the time.
Beta ‘playing’…soon?
Another link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmA6fR92pqI
Thanks Peter! Bummer about the width: raw movie here: http://www.seedcode.com/movies/calnext/calendarpreview2.3.mov
Beta playground coming soon. Stay tuned.