Tech Forum

The problem :

As an executive secretary, I have to often create new events in the calendar. In our meetings, I bring my Android tablet (which has a keyboard dock) and the calendar does not make it easy to create new events.

First, the location to click (tap) is not well defined and it happens often that I click on an already existing event. This seems fine using a normal mouse as the device has pixel-precision click. But the human finger is a little less precise and result in a loss of efficiency with a tablet/mobile.

Second, creating and managing an event takes two clicks. The "normal" dialog opening when selecting an event or creating a new one does not offer, in my opinion, the proper user interface. At the moment, creating an event requires me to perform the correct "click" (and I often have to retry a few times to get it right), then the entire page reload (which is often slow as there are a lot of content to display), modify the event then reload the entire calendar when done.

Here are my suggestions :

Instead of the actual behaviour, clicking anywhere in a calendar cell should pop out a cell's events details dialog. For example :
(Note : the dialog could be resizable to display event names that extend the width of the view container)

Creating a new event (or clicking on an empty calendar cell) would pop out an event details dialog. For example :
I believe these solutions would make the calendar be more responsive and help members manage their events more easily.

yanick.rochon wrote:First, the location to click (tap) is not well defined and it happens often that I click on an already existing event.

This method of creating a new event is one of two available. The second method avoids the issue described here as well as going directly to the "New Event" screen and bypassing the "New Event" popup.

The other method to create an event is to click the "Create new event" icon, the plus sign button, in the upper right of the calendar. This opens the "New Event" screen with the current date and the nearest hour set for the start time and an hour later for the end time.

I forgot to mention a very important thing :

Do NOT reload the entire calendars every time an event is edited or created, etc. The suggestion I'm making here provides that everything is done without page reload, through Ajax calls and invoking the calendar APIs directly. Threfore, show a floating dialog on top of the calendar with the event details (for edits) or an empty form (for new events) and simply refresh the selected, visible calendars on submit. Easy.

I'm not just throwing words here, I do this professionally and why I show that much interest into this feature is because this is not something hard to implement and would increase the speed of the Calendar tool tremendously.