Mailed events

New Format Example

jeffrey@osafoundation.org sent you a Recurring Event from Chandler:

Title: Staff meeting
Location:

Wednesday Sep 19, 2007 10:45 - 11:45 AM PDT (otherwise every other Thursday starting Sep 6, 2007)

Body

Details

• Don't try to use English sentences, have different attributes on different lines
• Include a Location: line even if there's no location, because the formatting looks ugly with only one label, and date/time looks bad if it DOES have a label
• Add a weekday name
• Separate recurrence description from specific date/time description
• Add the start (and optional end) dates for recurrence
• Distinguish exceptional date/time from the rule ("otherwise")
• Because weekly/biweekly are so common, special case date/time exceptions to them:
  • if the exception's day-of-week is different from the rule, say "otherwise every other Thursday"
  • if the day hasn't changed but the time has, don't repeat the day name, use "otherwise every other week from 11:45-11:50AM" (or at, for at-time events)
  • We're already doing this, continue to spell out "every other week" instead of biweekly, since a surprising number of people confuse the prefixes "bi" and "semi"
• Elide as much as possible:
  • AM/PM if they match in start/end this turns out to be a pain, so not doing this for now -- JeffreyHarris - 26 Oct 2007
  • times if they match in the recurrence rule

Degrees of Freedom

• Event types
  • any-time
  • all-day one day
  • all-day multi-day
  • timed multi-day
  • @time (no duration, not all-day)
• Event flags
  • AM/PM match in start and end
  • Floating
• Kinds
  • Message
  • Task
  • Event
• Recurrence flags
  • date exception (compare both start and end to master)
    
  • time exception (compare both start and end to master)
  • has recurrence end

Ways to describe an item

• Message (Only use Message if there are no other stamps.)
• Task
• Event
• Recurring Event
• All-day Event
• Recurring All-day Event
• Scheduled Task
• Recurring Scheduled Task
• If the item is a Recurring All-day Scheduled Task, just say Recurring Scheduled Task, trying to capture everything will be too wordy I think.

Note Anytime and @time events are never called out as such.

Lots more examples

jeffrey@osafoundation.org sent you a Scheduled Task from Chandler:

Title: Take out the garbage
Location:

Wednesday Sep 19, 2007 (otherwise every other Thursday from Sep 6, 2007 to October 7, 2007)

Body

-- JeffreyHarris - 19 Sep 2007