Calendaring - the missing features
April 13, 2020
Calendaring is missing a few features for me. I won’t claim that the features are useful to anyone else, just important to me.
Consumer calendaring applications are built to support some standard features.
-
Create a single or recurring event
- Possibly showing other events happening at the same time, such as via Google Calendar’s “Find a Time” component in its event creation screen.
- Add details such as a description, location, guests, notifications
-
Read
- Show events in a daily, weekly, monthly or agenda view
- Show details of a single event
- Search for events by title or description
- Update a single or recurring event
- Delete a a single or recurring event
Additionally, some applications or add-ons allow simple organization of events.
- creating multiple calendars
- sharing calendars with others
- Cozi: creating “schedules” that contain a list of events and adding family members to an event or schedules
- Google Calendar Tags add-on: a prettier way to shows tags on events in Google Calendar
These features are not enough for my use cases. I believe that calendaring applications are missing the following features, and I will dive deeper into the each underlying use case in future posts.
- Creating multiple events more quickly
- Easy grouping of events into series (e.g. for a rehearsal schedule)
- Better handling of exceptions in recurring events (e.g. all children’s events do not happen during school vacations)
- Adding images to events or series (e.g. document for rehearsal schedule)
- Showing conflicts for events
- Showing recent updates
- Deleting multiple events more easily
Follow along with my journey to creating a better calendaring system.