Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights(presently.live)
presently.live
Show HN: I built presently.live for better weekend planning and insights
https://presently.live/
5 comments
Hi - first of all... congratulations for putting this together.
I have some reservation about the whole concept of making weekends the focus of the whole planning.
Maybe it's because I live in Europe, but if one of our Bank Holiday falls on ... Tuesday, let's say, it is pretty normal to take a day off and enjoy a 4-days "weekend". This also applies to other cases were the national or bank holiday happens to be on Friday or Monday (e.g.: Easter).
In other words, some weekends are more "relevant" than others, but it is not so obvious if you do not also see potentially relevant dates of the week.
(I di try to plan my vacations/activities as early possible in the year, but I could not do it without a more complete view of the whole calendar.)
I have some reservation about the whole concept of making weekends the focus of the whole planning.
Maybe it's because I live in Europe, but if one of our Bank Holiday falls on ... Tuesday, let's say, it is pretty normal to take a day off and enjoy a 4-days "weekend". This also applies to other cases were the national or bank holiday happens to be on Friday or Monday (e.g.: Easter).
In other words, some weekends are more "relevant" than others, but it is not so obvious if you do not also see potentially relevant dates of the week.
(I di try to plan my vacations/activities as early possible in the year, but I could not do it without a more complete view of the whole calendar.)
That's a great insight that I've also been coming around to, although from the angle of needing to know which weekends fall within school holidays from multiple countries (cousins).
You can toggle the visibility of midweek events (e.g. bank holidays) alongside the primary row of weekends but it would be sweet if you didn't have to in order to have the same insight. Thanks for flagging!
We would typically have this "year-level" view open alongside a scrolling month view in our regular calendar to have a more complete picture, but not to totally replace the normal calendar...yet! Tweaks based on insights like yours (alongside write-access) have slowly meant that we switch back to the traditional view less and less. It's a design goal, but only if it's actually a better experience overall.
We would typically have this "year-level" view open alongside a scrolling month view in our regular calendar to have a more complete picture, but not to totally replace the normal calendar...yet! Tweaks based on insights like yours (alongside write-access) have slowly meant that we switch back to the traditional view less and less. It's a design goal, but only if it's actually a better experience overall.
In the old HN fashion:
- congrats for writing and publishing this useful looking tool!
- why are there no screenshots or preview how this will look like before I give access to my calendar
- congrats for writing and publishing this useful looking tool!
- why are there no screenshots or preview how this will look like before I give access to my calendar
Thanks for the feedback! - preview screenshot added just now.
It's funny how easy it is to miss those simple things despite having looked at it for so long.
I still don't quite get it. I can scroll my mouse on Google Calendar looking at the Saturday and Sunday columns. 12 clicks of my scroll wheel and I've seen my year of weekends. In your screenshot, I scroll left-to-right and Sat/Sun are combined, but I am not understanding the benefit of that.
The screenshot is just a small snippet, zoomed in for clarity (and to avoid sharing PII from my actual calendar) but I actually see about 5 months ahead at a time with zero clicks/scrolling on my standard browser.
Also I find the horizontal timeline view helps to spot clusters of too-much-going-on more intuitively than the typical wrapped view of a calendar block.
Also I find the horizontal timeline view helps to spot clusters of too-much-going-on more intuitively than the typical wrapped view of a calendar block.
Why are you relying on #free as the toggle when free/busy is an actual native attribute of an event in Google calendar?
Mainly because free/busy means different things in different contexts (i.e. work vs. personal vs. school) and so I wanted to keep any personal planning-related interpretations of busyness confined to this view.
That looks great, can already see some use cases in my personal life, congrats for shipping !!
that's awesome to hear, thanks!
Nice! It would be helpful to include more of the motivation up front.
Also the choice of domain name is...odd.
Also the choice of domain name is...odd.
haha, thanks - cheap & cheerful ftw
- When is our next free weekend? - What weekend activities have we got planned? - How busy/available are we to travel / host?
Especially at the start of each year, when we're trying to plan flights and/or commit to hosting friends & family visits, I struggled to find a usable overview of multiple months that wasn't cluttered with weekdays. Our social events are overwhelmingly centered around weekends and we wanted a view of the year ahead that reflected that.
How about just a line of 52 boxes, one per weekend ahead, shaded differently whether it was free or maybe busy or definitely busy? That was the initial sketch on a napkin that lead to a first proof of concept script that I ran locally.
Now, it's a webapp* that reads from our calendars (Google only for now, sorry) to visually summarise weekends - all with readonly access. I've since added some calendar-write features from there ("pro" version, completely free) as our lives become busier with a dog, and parenthood more recently. Features like event templates, summarising events by hashtags, flagging draft/unconfirmed events etc.
We've been using it to scratch our own planning itches for some years now already, and I'm sharing here now in case it can be useful for others. Even better if you have any feedback.
What / how have you hacked to get clearer and direct insights into your time?
I think time management and calendars have been lacking a UX overhaul for a long long time so it's a space I'm passionate about tinkering within.
*stack is Nuxt 3, backed by Supabase, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.