Mouse Wheel

[Obelix]

#3337

Might be cool if you can detect a mouse wheel to move the calendar up or down by a week at a time.  it is a little inconvenient as I get to the end of the month that I can’t see the next two weeks without changing the whole month.  If you can scroll on the mouse wheel movement without too much delay it would be great.  If you can do that (breaking up viewing away from whole month chunks) you could have a calendar option to always put the current week as the second or third one shown in the calendar.  That would give you a good starting position to see whats going on weeks before and after the current week.  Even without mouse wheel, having some way to scroll a week at a time would be nice.

[Eric Poulin]

#3582

Now this is a very interesting idea.  I find even myself wishing I could see just 1 more week at times.
There may be some visual complications with the category budgets…. for example, if you scroll down 2-3 weeks, then only half of the “current” month is showing.  I can figure out when to switch the current month  based on how many scroll have occurred, but there are some other concerns too.  The category highlights will not be able to show all category activity for the current month and the results “could be” misleading if you expect to see all of the category highlighted when looking at the budget surplus or shortage for a given category.
Perhaps I’ll need to grey-out somewhat cells that are not in the current month which could overcome some of this concern.

Any other thoughts?

[Obelix]

#3583

OK, how about this.  Only keep that summary updated to the current month.  it’s only speculation into the future anyways.  When it really matters is THIS month.  maybe you could  also put the month name beside the Categories label at the top.  Perhaps users could scroll/move around and the current calcs are for whatever month the user specifically focused on last.  Defaulting to the current month.  Changing to the dominant month in the displayed calendar.  whichever month had more days/weeks shown could claim the Categories list. alternately, leave it on the current month unless they browsed into the past.  Alternate 2, if they picked the month from the dropdown it would focus the Categories as it focused the calendar.  Ooh, here’s a better idea, put a dropdown box next to the Categories header to select the focus.  You could include all months/years (“Dec ’07” style) back to their first entry and I guess forward to their last.  If you allowed autochanging by some method as they moved the calendar, it would need to auto update itself.  of course if you always wanted the calendar and the Categories to be aligned, then you could just print the Month/year next to categories and use the dropdown you already have to select month (and I guess year unless you added a year spinner as well).

[Eric Poulin]

#3584

Firstly, our goal is to make CalendarBudget as easy to use as possible, so I’m really nit-picky about details, especially when it comes to user interface.  I think I’d want to keep the category list budgets and the current dominant month always in synch. 

We’ll still have the problem that when scrolled half way through a month, its possible that 1-2 weeks of the current month are no longer visible – thus the category highlights will be misrepresented somewhat.  However – to a degree we already have this problem when you have more transactions in any given day that can be shown without a mouseover.  In this case, any transactions that fall below the cell bottom border are also not visible. So solutions to this are either

• leave it as is – its not really that bad and its kind of obvious that the month is not completely visible
• put some kind of indicator beside the category in the sidebar indicating that not all entries are currently showing

Any preference?  We considered the second option anyway for the “too many transactions in a day to see everything” scenario.

[Lucas]

#3585

I like this idea, and I’d like to throw in a possible solution for the little dilemma….

Just indicate which month is being displayed in the box (Categories – February 2009), and decide which month is shown simply by determining which month has the more visible daily boxes on the screen. As you’re scrolling down, the number of daily boxes for the next month increments by 7 for each week while the number of boxes decreases by 7 per scroll… When the number of boxes for the next month is higher than the one for the “current” month, you change the values to the “next” month and it becomes the current one.

For February for example, currently you’re seeing 28 boxes for february, 14 for March. Scroll down once and you have 21 for Feb, 21 for March (when equal keep the current one), and then you scroll down again you have 14 for Feb and 28 for March – then you change the active month to March, display this in the summary on the left, change the background colors for the boxes and such (don’t forget the month drop-down on the top).

What do you think?

[Eric Poulin]

#3586

Yes, I hear that.
My only concern is… when we show 14 for Feb and 28 for March, and I switch to March in the category budgets and month indicator, that the whole month of March is not showing.  The category budgets are set for the whole month and thus there is a visual inconsistency since that whole month is not visible.  If, for example, you had a $5000 entry on Mar 30th (not visible), the category budget amounts won’t appear to make sense for that snapshot of the screen.

Perhaps I’m worrying too much about it, but I don’t want people to scroll partially through and wonder — hey why is that category so high, there’s nothing causing that (except that its in the 1 day thats off screen in the next week).

[Lucas]

#3587

You could potentially deal with this in 2 ways.

First would be a visual indicator (a small colored bar with an arrow pointing down saying “more entries in this month”, giving a cue that there is more information to be found. That indicator could also be in the category budget box (like a little warning icon and a small text).
or
“Snap” to a month, where scrolling the mouse would always show the full active month, and scrolling down would basically be going monthly. This would probably almost always result in one month per scroll however, so maybe that’s what you should do, simply (on a visual note, it would be great to actually “scroll” it in a smooth/bouncy way, not just to refresh the page).

[Eric Poulin]

#3588

Those suggestions might work.  I’ll revisit these ideas when I get closer to implementation of this feature.

[Lucas]

#3589

I just realized that Google Calendar simply goes from month to month when using the scroll wheel – one month at a time, no page reload, no bouncy effects… and I kind of like it. It does feel more intuitive than having to click arrows, and doing fancy javascript wouldn’t help the performance and simplicity of the page at all.

The only reason I would love to use the mouse wheel is because I want to be able to have a quick snapshot of the previous and next month fast – especially when there are months like February where the 1st of the month is the 1st square you see, there is nothing left from January.

Without going into the scroll wheel however, do you think it would be desirable to always show at least one day of the previous month on the calendar? See, if the 1st of the month is any other day than Sunday, it’ll always show the last 1-6 days of the previous month, where as if it’s on the Sunday is doesn’t – so whereas you can see weeks into the future, you can’t even see one day in the past.

I guess you could call that (option?) “Calendar Centering”…

[Eric Poulin]

#3590

The “centering” idea is good.  I may adopt that in all cases, since it gives better context and never causes a problem.
I think I prefer the idea of scrolling forward 1 month at a time rather than by weeks.
I’ve been planning to do data pre-fetch for previous and next month anyway, which will make scrolling forward or back 1 month fast.
I’m excited to get onto some of these features…. This All Accounts tab is taking a while since it affects many other features.  Hoping to have it out to you guys by end of this week.

[Lucas]

#3591

You’re the man, man!

I’m glad to live only 4 hours away from the guy who created CB. Makes me proud to be Canadian! (which brings me to another idea, check other post)

[Author]

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