TaskList Calendar Feature Proposal

Tor Norbye

Published Sep 21 2002

Some user tasks are recurring - for example, "check buglist once a week to make sure I don't have any remaining high priority bugs", or even "Team meeting Tuesdays at 1:30 - Capitola conference room".

The User Task List should handle these. In the "New Task" dialog, there should be a separate tab with "associated time" info, such as start and end times, recurrence (for example, "once a week"), and alarm info (for example, "play this sound file 15 minutes before the start time").

These new properties should be shown in a separate property sheet in the properties window.

Calendar View

In order to make it easy to see what these events are, there should be a "Calendar View". It has a couple of variations:

• Today. Lists the events scheduled for today along with their start/end times.
• This Week. Lists the events for the week in a schedule format.
• This Month. Looks like a calendar on the wall with events listed in each day slot.

It would be nice to allow drag selection in the calendar view to spawn the "New Task" dialog with the start/end times pre-populated from your selection.

Interoperability

Part of the reason for doing this is also to allow you to manage your calendar and todo list in one place. Many other tools, and indeed the iCalendar format itself, treats calendar events and todo items as two sides of the same coin (todo items are events without a start time but with a possible end/due date). The tasklist module stores files in the standard iCalendar format, and it preserves tags in the iCalendar format that it does not understand. Thus, you can use the tasklist module directly on your calendar manager files. If you use the IDE a lot it may be convenient to simply use tasklist for all your calendar needs.

So, specifically, we should implement

• RFC 2446 such that you can keep your calendar data on a calendar server, and
• RFC 2447 such that you can notify others of your schedule (busy time etc.) via e-mail.

Issues

• Consider adding today's events somewhere prominent in the regular tasklist's sort order. In other words, generally list the tasklist in entry order, but today's events get moved to the top as a reminder.

• We need a good date and time property editor to make time entry simple and convenient

• Jan Jancura has been workin on an "Office" module which from the screenshots appear to have a calendar view. It would be nice to integrate his code instead of rewriting this, when it's made available.