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Why the Tiny, Little Calendar?

By Jeff Apr 20 00:00:00, 2007

Ok, I know the CPO calendar is a little, shall we say, underwhelming. Essentially, it's functionality is ripped right from the Pageflakes calendar widget - it's unobtrusive, and I hope easy to use. But it's small and, currently, there's no "mother calendar" behind it such as one would find with 30 Boxes or Google Calendar or any of the 1000+ web calendars that are available. And that's the point - there are many stellar calendar apps on the web and I just didn't see the benefit in spending 2-3 months creating yet another.

30 Second Overview

Calendar entries are maked as icons in the day that they occur.  There are currently icons for project start dates, meetings, deadlines and general events.  More may come later - for example invoice due, task deadline, etc.  Hovering over an icon gives you a quick view of the details for a given entry.

The CreativePro Office calendar widget

For a more detailed view, click on a day and the entries for that day appear. You may delete entries from this view. 

CreativePro Office calendar widget - event view

Adding an event is quick and simple.   

CreativePro Office calendar widget - add event

I think the calendar widget achieves what I originally wanted which was a quick, at-a-glance, overview of my daily schedule without a lot of clutter.  This widget tends to fail once you get more than 5-6 entries for a given day.  But then, most of the time I have a maximum of three entries and often less than that.

Future Plans

Some of the improvements I intend to make in the next version of the calendar widget are:

  1. iCal and hCalendar support (import and export)
  2. RSS feed of calendar entries
  3. REST integration with some popular web calendars
  4. Ability to designate entries public or personal so your team can share a calendar
  5. Better integration with other CPO features like tasks and invoice dates.

Ultimately, I don't want my users to have to learn the idiosyncrasies of another calendar. I would rather the calendar widget simply act as window to whatever calendar users already enjoy using. However, the stand-alone functionality should be good enough to provide light duty event scheduling.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff

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