Now that we’ve got Google Maps, I’d like to see my calendar program (iCal) extended to pay more attention to the location of events. Show me how long it’ll take to get to events I’ve scheduled, based on where they are. Traffic estimates would make this really killer (at least here in So-Cal)
It might sound like you would need to tell the app where you will be at every point of the day for this to work, but you could avoid that by storing a ‘coming from’ location for each event - it could be the previous event, but you could also just pick it from a list of default places, like ‘Home’, ‘Work’, and ‘Hockey Rink’.
In my dream world, they’d look like error bars on a plot, they’d even have data about variability of the traffic estimates, and they’d be in the next version of iCal.
Here’s a quick visual, in case I didn’t describe it well enough:
Assume home is south of the office and the basketball court is north. Traffic is bad going north around 6. What it’s telling you now is you can go home fast, and have 30 minutes there before you have to leave again, go straight to the court, taking 45 minutes in traffic and getting there 45 minutes early, or have about an hour at the office, wait out traffic, and get to the court on time in about 25 minutes.
Update: I changed the example to be a little clearer - I added an option to show traffic choices, showed the times by the routes, and made one event appear selected, since you probably only want this extra info for the selected event.
I also made it a basketball game because everyone knows you’d need to go home to get your gear if you were going to the rink anyway. Seriously.
5:05 pm February 24, 2006
under mac
That’s a pretty slicky idea. My only dispute is that I think the ‘coming home’ line aught to extend below the event, not above. After all, we’re modeling time, not space.
.william
William - Not sure what you mean there. Maybe I didn’t pick the best example, but I did really mean to have the home line above the event - showing you how long it’d take to get to the rink if you were at home instead of being at the office. I’ll update the drawing, since if that’s the case, then it should also really tell you how long it’d take to get home from the office and how much time you’d have at home before you had to leave for the rink…
Ah. Now i understand - I thought the home ‘road’ was the time to get home after the game. Very cool idea.
That’s a super cool idea–love the mockup!
Thanks, Buzz - so it just occurred to me that sometimes walking is an option… Maybe not to people in the “Real World”, but those of us on a college campus might want to have similar information with walking distances. The question now is, does anyone have a graphic of tiny footprints so I can add another mockup?
[...] If you’re like me and don’t have a Leopard Preview, and if you haven’t seen the Leopard Developer Application Technologies Overview, you should take a look. There’s some pretty interesting stuff coming down the pipe. I like the Calendar store, which lets any application work with the iCal calendar info in much the same way as AddressBook.framework opens up the Address Book. Maybe we’ll see some enterprising developer add support for travel time in calendar display? [...]