An eventful week — Kalendar week 5 (GSoC 2021)

Last week’s MR turned into this week’s MR, and it just kept growing and growing and growing. I know I’m a mentor’s nightmare and I’m sorry Carl, I know it was a lot of changes to review…

The good news is that it was all worth it, because there have been lots of changes this week — small and big. Even better, you’ll finally be able to find the changes I went through in last week’s post on Kalendar’s master branch.

Let’s dive into the new stuff!

Editing the event editor

If you’ve been following these posts, you will have seen the event editor: an overlay sheet that lets you edit the details about an event down to a tee. Well, that overlay sheet is no more. It made sense when we had a few fields to fill, but as the capabilities of the event editor started to grow, it pretty quickly started to feel pretty cramped.

On the desktop, we now use the incredible power of windows to create a detached event editor window. So now you not only have plenty of space to punch in your next visit to your grandma’s, but you can also move it around and resize it. How revolutionary.

Of course, on your phone a window would be less than ideal. So if you use Kalendar in mobile mode, you’ll instead be greeted by the event editor as a page, maximising the space that the editor can have. This should let you see a lot more at once, with a lot less wasted space!

Yeeting events out of existence

Last week, deleting events was pretty low-key. You clicked delete on the dropdown and then something happened. What exactly? Who knows!

This week, if you try to delete an event, you’ll get a dialog that tells you exactly what’s going to happen. This’ll let you confirm what you’re deleting before you’re deleting it, giving you a chance to correct an oopsie. You’ll also know precisely what you’re deleting.

For recurring events, you’ll also get some handy extra options. You’ll have seen these in other calendar applications: you can choose whether to delete a specific event occurrence, all future occurrences, etc.

What’s going on?!

Also new this week is a better UI for viewing your events and their details. The popups have been replaced by a side-drawer that provides you with exactly what you need to know about what’s coming up: summary, description, location, and more.

On mobile, the side-drawer is an overlay drawer. This gives lets you make the most out of your phone’s vertical real estate to display as much data as possible at once.

But hey, we know, you have a great big chonkin’ display hooked up to your desktop, right? That’s why on desktop, the drawer is in fact in-line, letting you still view and interact with your calendar while it is open.

These are still under development, and they’ll get a bunch of additional useful information over the course of the next week. This includes reminder, recurrence and attendee information, clickable hyperlinks in descriptions and attendees, and icons.

More bugsplatting

The bugs continue on their never-ending march, onwards. Until the heat-death of the universe. I’m happy to say that some pretty big bugs got smashed this week, though:

  • Fixed bug where the date and time fields would show up empty in the event editor (FINALLY!!!)
  • Reminders and attendees should now always show up correctly in the event editor when editing events
  • Keyboard input in all fields – including date/time fields – works correctly, letting you edit and add events without touching your dirty mouse
  • Added warnings in the event editor for when an event has its end date set to a date before the start date. The event editor also prevents you from adding/saving an event in such a condition.
  • …and many smaller bugs too!

Coming up next

Efforts right now are being focused on getting the event info drawer up to scratch with everything you’d need to know about an event. But there’s a lot more on the horizon: other calendar items, undo/redo functionality, attachments… and new calendar views, too. Not all of that will land next week – in fact, most of it won’t! – but you can bet progress will be made. 😉

Is there anything you’d like to see added to this list? Get in touch! I’m @clau-cambra:kde.org on Matrix.