New Calendar System report from YW sec (loves, bugs, etc)

Discussions about the Calendar Tool at lds.org. Questions about the calendar on the classic site should be posted in the LUWS forum.
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jenny_smith
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New Calendar System report from YW sec (loves, bugs, etc)

#1

Post by jenny_smith »

I've been tinkering with the new calendar system ever since it was first in beta, and I'm so excited! I've written a forum entry about how we're using it in our young women's program here:
http://www.mormonshare.com/forum/sugges ... auxilaries

In short, we have created 4 calendars with differing options. One for birthdays, one for ward/public/parent viewing, one for presidency items, and one for the lesson schedule. Creating the multiple calendars gives us a lot of flexibility for printing, and helps us keep ourselves on track. When the other auxiliaries catch up and have their calendars going we will really be cooking with gas.

The new calendar is such an improvement over what we've used in the past. Thank you to everyone who has worked on it! My favorite feature is the ability to print only selected calendars. That alone has strengthened my testimony that the church's web programmers are true. ;)

I'm posting some bugs and annoyances hoping they'll help out the developers. Reporting them through the online email form just results in canned email responses.

Bugs
  • printing
    • when choosing multiple calendars to print, the final calendar item in the list is turned off by itself the first time you go to print. This happened to both my president and me on separate machines. We fixed it by creating a fake blank calendar to show at the bottom of our list of calendars, but that's pretty hackish.
    • when selecting months to print, the following month's calendar always prints, too, but it's blank. For example, if I say I want to print months
      January through February, April will print as well but it will be blank. This applies when printing even just one month.
  • changing calendar items from calendar to another sometimes results in a double printing of that item. Sometimes it even duplicates the item.
Annoyances
  • print time at the bottom of the printed version is in MST (and doesn't say so). It would be nice if it were local time.
  • "all day" items look horrible when printed.
  • print options shouldn't be hidden by default
  • I think black and white should be the default, especially since clerk office printers are all black and white.
  • repeats aren't sticky when you switch dates on an item.
  • changing dates -- when you have been working on March's calendar, and then decide to add an item in January, you change the start date on the item to January. But the end date is still when you were working in March. It would be nice if the end date changed to match the start date automatically when it's changed.
  • I'd like to export the YW lesson schedule for import by the other YW leaders in the stake, or worldwide. It isn't clear to me how to do that. Can't we just download a flat file instead of using those URLs? If so, how?
Wish list
  • Drag and drop calendar items - someday in the future, it would be SWEET if I could just drag and drop a whole slew of items (like the mutual calendar items) from one day to another when we change dates from Tuesday to Wednesday.
  • This is such a girl thing, but I wish we could select the colors of the calendars ourselves. Some of those colors are pretty nasty.
  • I can't see who created/altered a calendar item on other calendars. How do I know who to contact regarding that item if their name isn't visible? It would be nice to have an email link right on the item.
Thanks again for the great, great calendar system! I can tell that when this thing is set up right, most of the repeating calendar items will never have to be changed again, making future secretaries' jobs much easier.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
techgy
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#2

Post by techgy »

jenny_smith wrote:
  • Drag and drop calendar items - someday in the future, it would be SWEET if I could just drag and drop a whole slew of items (like the mutual calendar items) from one day to another when we change dates from Tuesday to Wednesday.
  • This is such a girl thing, but I wish we could select the colors of the calendars ourselves. Some of those colors are pretty nasty.


Jenny,
It's possible right now to drag/drop calendar items. Simply click on an event with the left mouse button and hold it while you drag it to a new date then release. Also, you can select what colors you want for each calendar template. Click on "Options/Select Subscriptions" then click on the colored icon next to the calendar choice. A patch of colors will appear from which you can choose a color.
Have you read the Code of Conduct?
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aebrown
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#3

Post by aebrown »

jenny_smith wrote:I'm posting some bugs and annoyances hoping they'll help out the developers. Reporting them through the online email form just results in canned email responses.

First of all, welcome to the forum and thanks for your post. It's great to get feedback from someone who has good experience, has thought about the issues, and is willing to share.

Although reporting through the Submit Feedback system may not seem valuable, I assure you that that system is the best way to get the feedback to the developers. Through some contacts I have I know that this feedback does get to the product managers and developers. Posting here will help the community, but is not at all a dependable way to get information to the developers. So please keep providing both kinds of feedback, but be aware that this forum is inhabited mostly by regular users just like you; the information you give via Submit Feedback goes to the product development team.

I'll try to get to some of your other points later, but here are two quick responses:
jenny_smith wrote:Drag and drop calendar items - someday in the future, it would be SWEET if I could just drag and drop a whole slew of items (like the mutual calendar items) from one day to another when we change dates from Tuesday to Wednesday.

I'm not sure if you are referring exclusively to drag and drop of multiple items. As techgy mentioned, you can already drag and drop any single event from one day to another. This is a particularly slick way to create an exception to a repeating event. For example, we have a certain meeting every second Sunday, but in May we don't want to conflict with Mothers Day, so I drag the May instance of that meeting to the third Sunday.

If you are dealing with a large group of items, I would think that it would be simpler and more efficient to change the repeating rules.
jenny_smith wrote:I can't see who created/altered a calendar item on other calendars. How do I know who to contact regarding that item if their name isn't visible? It would be nice to have an email link right on the item.

You're not the only one: see the thread Whodunnit!? for some agreement with your suggestion, and a possible (but rather lame) workaround.
Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.
kisaac
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#4

Post by kisaac »

jenny_smith wrote: Reporting them through the online email form just results in canned email responses.
I suspect it is really an auto-responder (or a secretary) that fires back your "canned email responses," perhaps due to volume, but I can also assure they are receptive to this feedback method and your suggestions. You can also copy your message URL and paste it into your feedback message so they can follow the link to a thread like this if they wish to see the discussion.

"We've had discussions about this topic on tech.lds.org at
https://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.p ... #post55276"
jenny_smith wrote:
  • This is such a girl thing, but I wish we could select the colors of the calendars ourselves. Some of those colors are pretty nasty.
I've grouped my calendars by colors, and it REALLY helps make it readable-at a glance. Stake calendars are all orange, YM are all blue, YW are all pink (sorry for any stereotypes here!,) etc. Then when needed to identify WHICH YM calendar contains the item, I can unselect or modify the colors as needed.
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tomjoht
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#5

Post by tomjoht »

Jenny, thanks for the feedback on the calendar. I'll make sure the QA lead for the calendar is aware of the bugs you mentioned. I appreciate your time in noting the issues. Hopefully many of these quirks will be worked out in future versions. Other commenters already mentioned that 2 of the 3 items on the wishlist are currently available.
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aebrown
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#6

Post by aebrown »

jenny_smith wrote:when choosing multiple calendars to print, the final calendar item in the list is turned off by itself the first time you go to print. This happened to both my president and me on separate machines. We fixed it by creating a fake blank calendar to show at the bottom of our list of calendars, but that's pretty hackish.

There is no option for choosing multiple calendars to print, so I'm guessing you are talking about unchecking boxes by calendars in the Subscribed Calendars list before clicking the Print button. Is that correct? If so, I'm unable to duplicate the problem. The system always prints precisely the calendars that I have checked to be included.
jenny_smith wrote:when selecting months to print, the following month's calendar always prints, too, but it's blank. For example, if I say I want to print months January through February, April will print as well but it will be blank. This applies when printing even just one month.

I'm also unable to duplicate this in the Mountain Time Zone. If I ask for January through March, I get exactly January through March.

But for any time zone east of Mountain, I get close to what you say (but if you have an all day event on the first day of the month, that event will appear).

And for any time zone west of Mountain, you get an extra month before the specified starting month.

It seems pretty clear that the system is using Mountain Time (perhaps the time on the servers running the application) to calculate which months to include. And in the case of Eastern Time Zone, that results in a date range for January - March that includes two hours of April 1, and thus the whole month of April is included. That's definitely a bug.
jenny_smith wrote:changing calendar items from calendar to another sometimes results in a double printing of that item. Sometimes it even duplicates the item.

I have done this many times and have never seen this effect. But you did say "sometimes", so it's tough to say what factors might cause it to happen.
jenny_smith wrote:print time at the bottom of the printed version is in MST (and doesn't say so). It would be nice if it were local time.
Good catch -- I agree that it should be in local time, just like everything else.
jenny_smith wrote:"all day" items look horrible when printed.

I guess "horrible" is in the eye of the beholder. Here's what I'm seeing (which looks fine to me):
Calendar-AllDay.png
Calendar-AllDay.png (4.79 KiB) Viewed 1206 times
Are you seeing something substantially different?
jenny_smith wrote:print options shouldn't be hidden by default
I suppose that's a matter of opinion. Obviously the developers went to extra work to hide the three options that are currently connected with "More page setup options". A dialog full of options can be overwhelming to some people, so it is a common user interface practice to show the most common options and then have some sort of "More" option to see the whole set of options.

Perhaps a compromise would be to make the setting sticky, so that if you expand the "More page setup options" section, it would remain expanded when you come back into the Print screen.
jenny_smith wrote:I think black and white should be the default, especially since clerk office printers are all black and white.
I would tend to disagree with this suggestion. If a printer can only print black and white, the print driver should print in gray scale by default. But most print drivers will have a setting for forcing black and white if that's what the user wants for printing color images. That seems to be a more appropriate place for such a user preference.
jenny_smith wrote:repeats aren't sticky when you switch dates on an item.
I'm not sure I follow you on this one. If I edit a repeating event, and I edit the entire series, the repeat settings are as I entered them, even if I change the start date or the end date. Perhaps you could share some more details as to what you mean.
jenny_smith wrote:changing dates -- when you have been working on March's calendar, and then decide to add an item in January, you change the start date on the item to January. But the end date is still when you were working in March. It would be nice if the end date changed to match the start date automatically when it's changed.
This one's a bit tricky, but I think I agree with you. If you change the start date to be later, then the end date is changed automatically to match the start date (since it makes no sense to have the end date before the start date). But if you change the start date to be earlier, it's possible you like the end date and you just want to create a range of dates. Nonetheless, if the start date and end date are the same and then you change the start date, the most likely case is that you want to move the end date to match the start date.
jenny_smith wrote:I'd like to export the YW lesson schedule for import by the other YW leaders in the stake, or worldwide. It isn't clear to me how to do that. Can't we just download a flat file instead of using those URLs? If so, how?
If you copy your sync URL into the address bar of your browser, you should get a file, which you can save to your hard drive (most likely with an .ics extension). That is an iCal file that can be shared with anyone who can import iCal files (which includes other users of the new calendar). Before you do that, you'd want to make sure that your list of subscribed calendars includes only those that you want to be in that iCal file.
Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.
jenny_smith
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Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2011 7:50 am

Thanks for the feedback

#7

Post by jenny_smith »

Thanks for taking a look at these things.

As for the color changing -- yay! I suggest a mouseover tooltip could be added to the color box for those not familiar with that icon.

Regarding the ugly all day items when printed, there's no top and bottom padding on the bubble. The text touches the border of the hangdown letters and top of the capital letters. I don't know if you're using CSS to control this or not, but if so, this style should be padding: 1px 0 1px 0 for better print readability for the High Priests, IMO. :rolleyes: It will result in those printed items being 2px taller than the screen version, so you may want to adjust your screen version to include the padding, too.

Drag and drop -- thanks again. A tooltip would have been nice though. Something like: "Click and hold to drag and drop, or click this item to get more information/edit."

The redraw error seems to occur when making changes to repeating events. This item "Combined YW - Mia Maids in charge; Priests conduct mutual" is a 6 month repeating item that occurs on the 3rd Tuesday. If I change the selected calendar and repeat for that item, the result is the duplicate entry you see in the attachment.
redraw-bug.jpg
(100.3 KiB) Downloaded 93 times
I'm using Firefox, if that matters.

At one time a similar error used to manifest itself as the entire calendar redrawing each item twice, but that has been fixed.

The printing error where the last calendar item was unclicked only occurred the FIRST time we printed. Each subsequent time it worked as expected.
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