137766 - Different Default Alarm Times BEFORE (or after) an Event for Different Event Types - e.g., anniversary (7 days), appointment (1 hr), etc.

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Peter Lairo]

Alarms Preferences - Default Alarm-Times *Before/After* an Event, Alarms Sound, etc.

The screenshot explains all. ;)

Comment 1

[Peter Lairo]

Attachment: Screenshot of Alarm Preferences

Useful preferences for Calendar alarms.

Comment 2

[mental]

plairo,

Remember, one issue per bug.  And no, your screenshot doesn't really explain
everything...

Bug 135593 deals with allowing selection of a user-chosen sound.  Bug 135558
deals with selectively enabling sound per event.  As far as I can tell, that
leaves categorizing events by type of event, functionality that doesn't yet
exist (so why have UI for it), and displaying missed alarms, which I don't fully
understand because you didn't explain.

Please restate what you are really interested in.

Comment 3

[Peter Lairo]

> Remember, one issue per bug.

OK, changing summary...

- Different Default Alarm Times BEFORE (or after) an Event for Different Event 
Types - e.g., anniversary (7 days), appointment (1 hr), etc.

Filing new bug for "Display missed alarms" pref... (BTW. That means if an alarm
happened while the PC was OFF, should the alarm still go off when the PC is
turned on again, but the event/alarm had already passed?)

Comment 4

[Peter Lairo]

OK, I just filed bug 138223 for a pref to "Display missed alarms (Yes/No)"

Comment 5

[Mike Potter]

There are some different issues here, like actually implementing different
classes of events.  I'm not going to get to this bug. 
Feel free to take this if you think its important.

Comment 6

[eric]

I have several users that are requesting this sort of functionality. Specificaly
they want to be alerted, to past Alarms when they turn the computer on but do
not wish to pollute their email's .... can alarms get a flag so that they alert
untill acknowleged ,or ignored?

Comment 7

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Setting wanted0.8- as the main Calendar developers will not devote any time to this in the 0.8 timeframe. Patches are, of course, always welcome.

Comment 8

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

Imo this should be implemented in an add-on not the core product because it adds too much complexity to the preference dialog.

-> Voting for WONTFIX [extension fodder]

Comment 9

[Peter Lairo]

For a meeting, i want to be notified x *minutes* beforehand because I'm already at the office and just need a reminder in case I'm distracted by another urgent task. 

For birthdays/anniversaries, i want to be notified x *days* beforehand so i have time to think about and get a present or card. 

It's an important distinction that should not be delegated to extension limbo. I doesn't need to be a fine-grained as Lotus Organizer (still the world's best PIM), but it should be there in some form as in the screenshot.

Comment 10

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

Maybe this will work out if we add the alarm options to the category preferences. Still not sure how this feature should act though. I assume you want this to happen only when a new event is created, the user leaves the alarm preferences alone and then selects a category?

Anyway, if you look at the bigger picture, an extension that provides templates for new events would allow you to provide different "default alarm" settings per category. See bug 361213.

Comment 11

[Peter Lairo]

You're close. But I'm not talking about categories; I'm talking about types of calendar entries that are selected under "File / New...". These are "Events" and "Tasks", and (hopefully soon) "Calls" and "Anniversaries".

 Set default alarm times for:
                  On?
  Events:         [x] [ 30 ] [ minutes ]
  Tasks:          [x] [  5 ] [ minutes ]
  Calls:          [ ] [ 10 ] [ minutes ]
  Anniversaries:  [x] [  7 ] [ days    ]

We can probably drop the before/after selection because I can't think of a reason someone would want to be notified after something *per default*.

BTW: I think "Calls" would be very good to have because calls are typically much shorter than events (2-7 min vs. 1-4 hrs) and involve contact details (name, phone#) so the edit dialog needs to be different (finer time selector, stopwatch, contact info). Calls entries should also look different in the calendar (e.g., a small phone icon, name).

Comment 12

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] [:📆][:🧩]]

(In reply to comment #11)
> You're close. But I'm not talking about categories; I'm talking about types of
> calendar entries that are selected under "File / New...". These are "Events"
> and "Tasks", and (hopefully soon) "Calls" and "Anniversaries".
This introduces even a new level of event creation logic. I'd like to keep it simple. Since there is no ical representation of such new events other than using categories, the UI would be inconsistent. Even if you map the event types to categories, the event dialog switching would be strange.

> We can probably drop the before/after selection because I can't think of a
> reason someone would want to be notified after something *per default*.
This needs to be extended anyway, maybe you want to have an sms or email alarm by default.


> BTW: I think "Calls" would be very good to have because calls are typically
> much shorter than events (2-7 min vs. 1-4 hrs) and involve contact details
> (name, phone#) so the edit dialog needs to be different (finer time selector,
> stopwatch, contact info). Calls entries should also look different in the
> calendar (e.g., a small phone icon, name).
This definitely sounds like an extension task to me.

Comment 13

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

It may be difficult to find the right interoperability with normal alarms and this.
Wouldn't be an issue to combine with bug 1497434 though!