0.7 Email Specification

Authors: Sheila Mooney, Mimi Yin Last edited: Jun 20th, 2006 Creation date: May 30th, 2006
Reviewers:

Overview

Goals and Objectives

In 0.7, we want to make a few tweaks to the Mini-calendar and Preview pane based on 0.6 dogfood feedback. Some of this work has already been done in 0.7Alpha2 but there are still a number of unfinished items we thought should be documented.

Sheila Mooney
Spec owner
Mimi Yin
Spec contributor
Brian Kirsch
Implementor

Alpha4 Mini Cal and Preview Pane Modifications

Preview Pane

When the summary pane displays a calendar canvas (aka when the user is looking at user-defined collections in the Calendar app), we will title the preview pane with 'Today's events' in XS font (10 point and bold) to provide the users feedback that the preview pane stays fixed on 'Today's events' in the calendar view and does not correspond to the selection in the mini-cal.

If the user leaves the calendar view, the title disappears and the contents of the preview pane will become a slave of the mini-calendar selection and display confirmed, 'mine' events for the selected date.

Nice to have: Ability to click on an event in the preview pane and directly navigate to that event in a calendar view. This means if I am not in the calendar view, I switch to the appropriate collection in the Calendar app area.

For 0.7, we would like to have the ability to display more events in the preview pane. Many of our dogfood users have busy calendars and we currently only display a maximum of 4 events in the preview area, followed by the number of events that can't be displayed. We intend to address this in 2 ways.

Nice to have: Ability to double click on an event in the preview pane and directly navigate to that event in a calendar view. This means if I am not in the calendar view, I switch to the appropriate collection in the Calendar app area (as in, the 1st Calendar that contains this item in the sidebar).

We have also decided that it's worthwhile trying to associated some behavior when you single click on the event in the preview area. In this case, it will highlight that event text in the preview area and display the detail view for that event. The main canvas does not change from a table view to the calendar view (unless we are in that app area already).

Mini Cal/Preview Behavior When Selecting OOTB Collections

We are planning on changing the behavior of the Out-Of-The-Box collections and have them display a table when when selected, even if we are in the Calendar app area. Since we are making this change, we need to decide how the Mini Cal and Preview Area should behave. It seems reasonable that the Mini-Cal and Preview Pane should behave the way it does when we are looking at the table view in other app areas. This means that the Preview Pane is not fixed on today's events.

Mini-Cal improvements

  1. These improvements were proposed and discussed on the list: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/design/2006-May/004717.html
  2. Fatten the busy-bars (3 pixels instead of 2), but keep them light  in saturation so that they don't compete with the date numbers. 
    Compare May and June.
  3. Make the busy-bars flush with the dividers. Right now, they are  still 1 pixel above the dividers.
  4. Limit the top of the busy-bar to be 3 pixels below the top of the date numbers. (The busy-bars running all the way to the top of the 
    date numbers breaks up the week-rows and creates visual noise.) See June 23rd as an example of this.
  5. Darken the selection color (66% grey, down from 80% grey) and reverse the color of the date numbers to be white when selected. See  1st week of May (Week view selection) and June 8th (Day view selection)
  6. Add an 80% grey background to call-out TODAY (refers to grey background for TODAY in the main calendar canvas): See June 6th.
  7. Darken the selection when TODAY is selected: 50% grey: See May 4th and June 8th.

Various Mini-Cal and Preview Pane Bugs

There are a number of bugs we want to fix for 0.7, if some of these get in for Alpha3 or Alpha4 great but they can certainly be staged throughout 0.7.

History

Author Edit date Description
Sheila Mooney
May 29, 2006
First draft of modifications for 0.7.