Old Free-Busy Design Notes from 0.5 Planning

• Viewing free-busy information (Free-busy view scoped out of 0.5 on 11/11/04 per discussions with Engineering).
  • The workflows and details around how to publish free-busy are tied to sharing and will be further defined in that spec. In brief, a person's free-busy information will be published when they share a calendar. If user doesn't share their entire calendar, they will only show free-busy for the calendar events that they chose to share.

• Upon tabbing out of the field, or clicking enter the Schedule button enables (not sure if in detail view or toolbar button).
• Click Schedule to switches to the scheduling view which populates the summary table area.
  • [OI] Need to discuss with engineering about the best display format for this and option (modal vs modal-like).
  • Modal dialog-like schedule view for 0.5 (still under discussion).
  • Click the Schedule button again to revert back to the previous view (still under discussion).
  • If we had specified a date and time before clicking Schedule, the calendar view would jump to that day view or week view (for that day) depending on what view was displayed.
  • If we have not specified the date and time of the event, we would display the day or week view for today.
  • If we modify the date-time in the invitation detail view, the calendar day should change as we type enter or tab out of that field.
• Once we click schedule, if Mimi and Chao have published their free busy schedule, the information will appear as seen in the gif below.
• A color marker will appear next to each of the names in the To field as a legend. The colors are assigned at random.
• If Mimi and/or Chao have not published their free-busy schedules, a N/A appears next to their name and nothing is displayed.
• Sheila can use the calendar navigation buttons to move forward and back to find a date that works for everyone's shedule [OI] Based on modal discussion.
• Free-busy is the combination of all confirmed and tentitive events in the All collection.

• Cutting and pasting into the date-time widget. We should probably handle this in 2 phases.
  • 1. We can simply cut/paste or drag and drop between the text fields. Once the string is pasted into the date-time field it is parsed as if we simply typed into the field.
  • 2. [OI] When we paste something into the date-time field do we want to somehow remember the context of the text ie: where the item came from? If we pasted from a note that was created last week, the meaning of Next Tuesday if different than if the note context was today.

• Visual design
  • Displaying different colors for each calendar
  • Displaying alarm and recurrence icons per event item in the calendar
  • Visually distinguishing between items in the currently selected calendar v. items in turned on calendars