Summary

Meeting to discuss the principles and planning strategy for getting the correct set of features for calendar usability goals for 0.6 and beyond.

Attendees

Mitch, Mimi, Sheila

Next Steps

• Sheila (with Mimi's help) will put together a page with a proposal for 2 lists.
  • Clean-up features and visual polish.
  • Conventional calendar features that we need.
• Mitch will provide input and feedback, tentatively we will discuss this on Friday.
• Sheila needs to own a few follow-up tasks
  • Iterating on these lists and identifying the series of meetings/dicussions necessary.
  • Talking to Katie and Lisa about strategy and getting thoughts/feedback concerns etc.

Notes

• Exploring the principles for getting the right features for calendar centric approach for 0.6. We should be asking the following questions?
  • What do we need to do in order get a usable conventional calendar into people's hands who use a calendar now or have a calendar that doesn't currently meet their needs?
  • How do we structure things so they don't inhibit people from just using the calendar in Chandler?
  • By choice and by design we have asked the second question first. We have spent a lot of time on innovative solutions and we have never put front and center, the goal to complete the work for conventional calendar usage.

• Plan of attack
  • Should aspire to get as quickly as possible to a point where what is in the release is clean and free of blemishes.
  • Clean everything up so that it's coherent and figure out what we need next.
    • layout, fonts, icons, so that the UI doesn't distract visually - immediately after 0.5.
    • what are the widgets dependencies?
    • what new features do we need...multiple layouts for narrow and wide screens?
    • what is available with new releases of wxWidgets and when?
    • what do we really want stuff to look like? events, status, overlays.

• There is a fundamental difference between all of this work and the additional things that we need in the application. Things we need in the app fall into 2 categories:
  • features for a conventional calendar and
  • other things.
• Cleaning-up functionality is a subset of all the calendar features.
• Want to find the fastest path that gives us credibility: which means cleaning-up the current stuff.
• Within the scope of this planning, address issues such as:
  • Anytime events are a good candidate for these discussions.
  • What happens when our representation is richer than the standard. Lisa and Jeffrey discussion.
  • Interoperability is very important - sacrifice some of our independence not to upset users.
• Identify a couple of major milestones, based on level of features. Build the dev schedule with this in mind.
• Approach discussions about clusters of features that involve import/export interoperability domain: How many levels? Need to have a plan.
• Nominate investigative work for Exchange interoperability, like we are doing with iCal, critical planning task early on.

• Distinguish between use cases where people have 1 event per calendar and events that live on more than one calendar.
  • Really work out the use cases where one event is on one calendar.
  • How do we deal with the case where people put events into more than one calendar - 2 options
    • Disable this.
    • Permit them to do this but don't display it well.
  • Make an assumption that we have 1 event per calendar and find a solution. After we find this solution, then figure out...how does this break if people have events on more than 1 calendar?

• In general how do we deal with things where people want to explore the other features?
  • Disable stuff that doesn't work or is confusing.
    • Appbar: All, Mail and Tasks
    • Markup bar and stamping
  • Once we get the calendar stuff defined and we see what else is going on. Have functionality disabled and have a preference for advanced people to turn it on.
  • Setting expectations.

• We are going to need a way to backup your data. How do we export data? Can users backup their calendar? In a file or put it on the server.

• Next steps:
  • Identify feature clusters, milestones and setup meetings.
  • Focus on conventional calendar use.
  • Tabular view of calendar data is not basic functionality.
  • Sorting on columns is not on the list of things we need to do.
  • Define a body of work that satisfies the calendar functionality.
  • There will be a separate list with priorities.
  • 2 streams of development.
  • Find out what the show-stoppers are. What can't we do and why?

• Need to understand what it will take to get it to look nice.
  • Start with designing visuals and finding out why we can and can't do certain things.
  • How are we going to get gradient and drop shadows. What is it going to take to get these features?

• What is a our message for tasks?
  • Give Mitch plan that doesn't include handling tasks first.
  • Maybe we could turn off stamping.

• Working list for buckets
• Bucket #1 -> 0.6 candidate
  • overlay calendars and colors
  • getting sharing working well.
    • one writer and many readers for sharing.
  • finishing out what is kind of there and visual.
  • what kind of timezone stuff do we need - do we show timezones?

• Bucket #2 -> 0.7 candidate (maybe some of this in 0.6 depending on resources)
  • recurrence
  • search on calendar
  • preview in mini cal
  • free-busy
  • invitations
  • read/write sharing
  • CALDAV support
  • everything else in sharing
  • finish import/export of calendars

• -> call whatever it is we are going to do next is 0.6 -> conventional calendar usage for 0.6.
• -> call whatever is after 0.7.