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Author Topic: SOLVED: Visual Progressive Countdown Calendar  (Read 7070 times)

diannelamerc

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SOLVED: Visual Progressive Countdown Calendar
« on: January 20, 2015, 05:36 PM »
O.K., I know little to nothing about coding (I've just found a couple of really cool programs here in the past), so I don't know what scale something like this would be, but here goes:

Something I've been looking for for years is a countdown clock that gives a visual representation of coming events in gradations of color or status bars instead of "x days until" notices.

What I'm envisioning is a (stand-alone?, self-hosted web-based?, [I'm on Win7, FWIW]) that would mean I could:

  • Pick a significant day
  • Put a label on it
  • Pick (or be auto-assigned) a color
  • Indicate how far out I want the countdown to start [1 month, January 20th, etc.]

And end up with a very basic calendar where I could see a basic multi-day bar for the event, but one that was color gradient, such that on the start day it would be 0% and on the last day 100%

my-calendar-example.jpg,

That is: the green bar, not the red or blue ones. (Tapering the bar up in size rather than color would work too, but I imagine that would be more complicated.)

So I could see my next con coming two months out, my sister's birthday a week out, and visually get a sense of how close (intense) various events are to today.

I don't need alarms or anything elaborate and it would best be done as separate utility from a daily calendar/scheduler just for clarity anyway. Nice extras would be being able to hover to get the name of the coming event and/or the % we're at today. Just something I could pull up/open and remind my very visually oriented self how close certain events and deadlines are looming.

Doable anyone?

skwire

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Re: SOLVED: Visual Progressive Countdown Calendar
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2015, 05:50 PM »
Is the calendar portion crucial?  If not, perhaps mouser's own Progress Bars of Life might suit you?

https://www.donation...oftware/Mouser/pbol/

diannelamerc

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Re: SOLVED: Visual Progressive Countdown Calendar
« Reply #2 on: January 20, 2015, 05:52 PM »
Is the calendar portion crucial?  If not, perhaps mouser's own Progress Bars of Life might suit you?

https://www.donation...oftware/Mouser/pbol/

I hadn't even thought to look for something that wasn't a calendar, but I think that would probably work fine.

Thanks!

skwire

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Re: SOLVED: Visual Progressive Countdown Calendar
« Reply #3 on: January 20, 2015, 06:10 PM »
I hadn't even thought to look for something that wasn't a calendar, but I think that would probably work fine.
Thanks!

You're welcome and welcome to DonationCoder as well.  If PBoL is going to work for you, do you mind if I mark this thread as solved?

TaoPhoenix

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Re: SOLVED: Visual Progressive Countdown Calendar
« Reply #4 on: January 20, 2015, 06:42 PM »
Is the calendar portion crucial?  If not, perhaps mouser's own Progress Bars of Life might suit you?

https://www.donation...oftware/Mouser/pbol/

The calendar portion is interesting, because stuff happens "on days", not really "in a bar". I've had real trouble staying focused for a while! And also you can see the overlapping time frames, and on any particular day you make your decisions based on the dynamic priorities.

So as you suddenly discover yourself unfocusing--> procrastinating, to see the days click by as "wasted" (or not, if you are prepping a multi day thing bit by bit), has value.

An interesting alt second half is stuff that needs to be done "in varying shades of now", and then maybe it starts a different color bar in the opposite direction of how badly the unfocusing is making the time slip away!

Now, this is all easy to do, to a point, on a reg calendar with pencils and pens, but just saying the physical day integration has its own value. For ex a progress bar can "overstate" how much time you have left, and you subconsciously fail to correctly back out weekends that aren't business days.

Programming wise, it may not be wholly necessary to super-calculate stuff, but maybe have some nice drag-drop so let's say you have a four day item, you just drag the bar over four days, and then the program just logs what you drew. "Oh. Four days. Got it. I think. Is this correct? Yes/no."


diannelamerc

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Re: SOLVED: Visual Progressive Countdown Calendar
« Reply #5 on: January 20, 2015, 06:44 PM »
I hadn't even thought to look for something that wasn't a calendar, but I think that would probably work fine.
Thanks!

You're welcome and welcome to DonationCoder as well.  If PBoL is going to work for you, do you mind if I mark this thread as solved?

Yeah, it's going to work just fine for what I need (although I agree with TaoPhoenix that having dates attached would be a nice focus as well).