Post-2022 Roadmap

This is an opiniated strategic UX roadmap by @jfft on what remains to be done, as of 2023, to unlock GNOME Calendar's true potential as a productivity tool for chaos warriors, whose calendars typically look like this:

Click to expand: "How does this roadmap work? And how do I help?"

This roadmap is about core features, UX and roadblocking bugfixes required to provide a truly compelling replacement for Google Calendar, iCal, or other best-of-breed calendaring applications. This is not a roadmap of every imaginable feature under the sun, nor all the bugs, but taking care of the items below takes care of many other issues at the same time. It an ambitious but "high-impact" plan.

It is ordered by feature-set/logic grouping, not necessarily by "order in which things will be chronologically implemented in practice". For that, the list of merge requests and the main development kanban board's "Next up" (prioritized backlog) list (curated by @jfft) and "To Do" or "Doing" lists (self-managed by whoever implements each feature, be it @feaneron or any other contributor), are a good visual indication of the order of priorities and "who is working on what now".

The "Next up" prioritized backlog's ordering is based on these factors:

Criticality and impact
Whether it is fundamental/blocking to the architecture of another feature in the roadmap
The right amount of difficulty (not too trivial, unless critical, and not too complex) that warrants the attention of experienced developers. Many newcomers-tagged issues that are less mission-critical are left out of the list, for new contributors to tackle (until the list is empty, that is) and to keep the "next up" list short.

That said, for new/occasional contributors looking at this: please, do feel free to work on implementing any feature or bugfix, whether it is tagged newcomers or not, and whether it is in the "next up" list or not. We need all the help we can get.

The roadmap

Temporary: fundamental/critical/regression bugfixes for version 44

Breaking free of the artificial limitations of traditional "Month" and "Week" views

Context, according to @jfft:

9-to-5 Monday-to-Friday weeks and months-based boundaries are an invention (see 1, 2, 3) of the "modern" industrial age where many workers have regimented work/sleep schedules. However, it is not the only way… and indeed it does not match at all the lifestyle of certain types of workers (healthcare workers, restaurant workers, real estate agents, freelancers, emergency service workers, business owners, on-call technicians, PhD students etc.). Furthermore, flexible schedules are becoming increasingly common even for workers who were previously constrained to the "9-5, Mon-Fri" work week. Therefore, we should break free of those artificial limitations in GNOME Calendar's views. The "Today" button will make more sense, and various keyboard shortcuts can be added for traditional month/week-based boundaries.

First, some preliminary work to be done to open the way:

Issue #796 (closed) — Cannot create multiday events in two months by dragging
Issue #894 (closed) — Display events on non-current months for all visible days in Month view
Issue #160 — Allow first day of week to be changed
Issue #962 — Relocate the month name (and maybe year) header label to inside the cell of the 1st day of the month

Then, the real deal: issue #603 ("Infinite Scroll" views, ideally with configurable amount of week rows or day columns)… and maybe (if necessary or useful as a proof-of-concept or stepping stones towards the "infinite scroll" view):

Issue #1 (closed) — Fixed "next 3 weeks" view mode
Issue #649 — Fixed "multi-days" view(s)

Timezones and Meetings support

Issue #2 — Timezone support (fundamental to meetings and fixing tons of bugs)
Issue #20 — Multiple timezone columns in the week view's margin (as this might be useful for the meeting organizing widgets)
Visually differentiate normal/confirmed events from...
- …declined/cancelled events — issue #622
- …tentative/unconfirmed/"maybe" events — issue #833
Things that require email client integration:
- Issue #698 — Ability to "Accept" or "Decline" events from received calendar invites
- Issue #331 — Meetings invitations creation (and guests handling functionality) as an organizer
Issue #717 — Allow setting availability (free/busy) property

"Less critical, but really good to have" UX/features

Improved information density

Reducing visual/choices overload

Issue #242 (closed) — Quick add popover: show a visual indication when adding events to invisible calendars
Issue #39 — Event editor dialog: show a visual indication when creating / adding events to invisible calendars
Issue #950 — Event editor dialog: show a visual indication when moving an event to a hidden calendar
Issue #957 — Event editor dialog: don't show read-only remote calendars among possible calendars to move an event to
Issue #68 — Event editor dialog's calendar picker list widget should hide the currently selected calendar
Issue #89 — Calendar lists: don't make me scroll
Issue #88 — Ability to fully disable (not just hide) some EDS calendars (such as the default "Personal" calendar)
Issue #362 — Automatic grouping/deduplication of identical events from different calendars

Time-saving details

Flexibility and accuracy

Issue #251 — Reminders time delay presets are inflexible (ability to set precise custom delays for notifications and alarms)
Issue #98 — Ability to set / configure (or auto-remember) per-calendar default reminder alarm time delays, for newly created or imported ical events
Issue #938 — Monthly recurring events on 29th, 30th, 31st day should be rounded down to the last day of the month
Issue #254 — Allow enforcing ISO 8601 dates input (YYYY-MM-DD) in the event editing dialog, no matter the system's locale

Other related issues

Dynamic lists of bugs to fix

Here are some convenience shortcuts for topical thigs we need to fix, to support the reliability of features:

All issues related to timezones, midnight, DST (for now we're lumping them all together in "timezones")
All issues related to recurrence (many have been fixed already)
All issues related to meetings
All crashers

"Nice to have" bonus things (ponies on rainbows)

These are not critical enough to be near the top of the list, but still tie into the "all interconnected" system logic of features above. Many of those are probably

Issue #814 — Embed a small regional map in the popover (and event editor) when a location is set
Issue #961 — Provide a visual indication of which calendars are read-only in the "Manage Calendars" dialog
Issue #267 — Progress indication throbber for remote events operations on high-latency / slow servers
Issue #231 — Open Weather App from Calendar weather icons
Issue #253 — Show human-readable dates in tooltips
Issue #917 — Overflowing all-day week view "Other events" should reveal their contents in a tooltip on hover, and unfold on clicking "Other X events"

Click to expand: other bugs

Already fixed at the time this roadmap was made:

Issue #248 (closed) — Drag and drop of time-based events in weekview does not take into account the position of the cursor
Many recurrence bugs (yay!)
Many colors/contrast-related bugs (before GNOME 42) like issue #190 (closed), #344 (closed)
Various GTK3-related issues

Edited Aug 27, 2023 by Jeff Fortin Tam