266166 - Use Tabs to switch between Months in the Month View

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 513536

(Calendar :: Calendar Frontend, enhancement)

Description

[Charles Stuart]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1

Sunbird could use tabs to switch between months in the month view. The current
buttons are just text (in open space) - which isn't very indicative of their
functionality. Plus with text-only blue buttons I expect the cursor to change to
the pointer hand - and then it doesn't. Minor... I know.




Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Rod Whiteley]

Page Up and Page down change the month in the Month view, which is what I would
expect. 

Tab moves focus around the window, which is also what I would expect.  (It does
not work very well, but that is another matter.)  I think it would be a very bad
idea to use Tab for some other purpose.

I see a hand pointer over the arrows and over the month names (except the
current month's name, of course) on Win98.

I agree that the appearance of the month names is unusual, and it gives you very
little clue that they are clickable.

Comment 2

[Charles Stuart]

Hello Rod,

Sorry I didn't explain myself better. 

What I meant was to show months in a tabbed interface, just like the tabbed
browsing in Firefox and Safari. So each tab would be a month, and on the left
and right there could be arrow buttons to move forward or backward in time.

Now the problems I see with this are:

* how many months to show at once, as too many tabs would create clutter.
* how this might be an unfamiliar use of tabs for some people.

I would propose to show 3 months at a time, with an arrow button on each side.
The middle tab would always be the current month, and the type would be bold. 

The problem with this is:

* Once you clicked on a different month the location of the months would change,
which might cause confusion for people, as in "where did my damn August go?".

As well I think a positive outcome of this would be to seperate the "time
region" selector from the actual calendar, thus making it clear "oh, i click
here to change where i'm at, and i look here to see what's there."

I think this could be applied to each view (day/week/multi-week/month).

Thanks for your time. I hope this is productive.

Comment 3

[Rod Whiteley]

I see what you mean now, and I agree with you.  It would be a little strange,
but not so strange as the current interface.

Comment 4

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

Reassigning all automatically assigned bugs from Mostafa to nobody@m.o

Bugspam filter: TorontoMostafaMove

Comment 5

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

I think this is not a good idea from a UI perspective. Having tabs in months would break the notion of what the current view really is (I know that you could at least partially solve this with a decent tab focus story).

If you look at other tabbed interfaces, they are always centered around displaying different windows (browser) or or different messages (mail). Our center from a UI perspective are the different views (day, week, multiweek, month), not the different time cycles within those views.

--> WONTFIX

Comment 6

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

I disagree with the reasoning above. Using tabs to switch between views would be suing tabs to show the same data. But using tabs to switch the period that's displayed would use them to show different data, just like browser tabs.

There might be a slight problem in using tabs: time is unlimited, but you can't display an unlimited amount of tabs. You could display just the next few and previous few months, but if you select a different month in that way, the selected tab should not change. But then you want to display the same amount of surrounding months. That could be done by some scrolling animation, maybe.

Anyway, I think it's up to christian to decide on this.

Comment 7

[Pete Riley]

If there were tabs, it would be nice if there was an option for the user to open them only on demand (like in Firefox) instead of always having a fixed number of them.

For example, sometimes I have to switch the view back and forth between the current month and one that's six months in the future.  It would be nice to be able to open these two non-contiguous months in tabs and to use the tabs to navigate back and forth instead of the minimonth controls.

Comment 9

[Markus Adrario [:Taraman]]

With the upcoming TB 3 release and the Lightning integration there might arise a new possibility for this.

Calendar is opened in an own tab now, so is the task view. We could have the option of opening additional calendar tabs, so everybody could use it as he needs.

If this is not agreed upon, we should finally mark this one as WONTFIX.

Comment 10

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

I can't say anything from a UI perspective, but from a technical perspective, the only issues I'd have with this is performance.  If you have a month full of events it might take half a minute to display all events. More tabs means more boxes, means more things to refresh when the auto-refresh timer fires. We could optimize and mark the not shown tabs as dirty, and refresh them as soon as they are shown though.

Inverse's performance patches might make this a viable option though.

Comment 11

[Pete Riley]

I think it would be even nicer to also have different calendar selections in different tabs.  For example:

Tab 1:  email
Tab 2:  work calendars
Tab 3:  home calendars
Tab 4:  wife's calendars
Tab 5:  kids' soccer schedules

I think this would be much faster and easier than using bug 255180 ("Tree view in calendar list") where you would have to repeatedly toggle the checkboxes in the calendar list throughout each day.

It might also help solve bug 417217 ("'Select only this calendar' is missing in calendar context menu").

These things would also be nice:

1) Integrated into Thunderbird's Session Restore (bug 459096).

2) Integrated into Philipp's Bookmark Toolbar (bug 464783).  For example, so we can quickly open a rarely used combination of calendars that we don't save with Session Restore.

3) Ability to rename tab titles and save the new names to Session Restore / Bookmark Toolbar.

Comment 12

[Pete Riley]

I know that my previous comment and this one aren't 100% related to comment 0, but this seems like the best place to discuss this for now, especially considering that comment 0 was written in 2004 and that that UI no longer exists for changing months (i.e. clicking on:  june july AUGUST september october at the top of month view).  I personally think that implementing that functionality in tabs no longer makes sense, at least not in Lightning because it also has email tabs, but maybe it still makes sense in Sunbird.

I'll gladly create a different bug request if you want.  Anyway, I just wanted to say one more thing...

> It might also help solve bug 417217 ("'Select only this calendar' is missing in
> calendar context menu").
Specifically, the context menu could have a command to "Open in new tab" the calendar (and only that calendar) that the user right clicks on.

Comment 13

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Given that Sunbird doesn't have tabs at all and this bug has some now unrelated history, I've opened two new bugs: Implement Tabs in Sunbird (bug 513537) and Allow multiple calendar tabs (bug 513536).

The way tabs are implemented in Sunbird would then be up to whoever steps up to save Sunbird.