Day and Year Views in 1.9

Posted on by TheJoeFin
Day And Year Views

Completing the standard calendar views with a Day View and a Year View will be coming in version 1.9 of Ink Calendar. Development has been underway for awhile to bring these two new views in the best way possible. Not only simple views but also the ability to customize them to your liking.

Day view is a simple rectangle with a grid dots over the canvas. From the settings choose the shape/layout of the canvas. Keep in mind that changing the view does require an app restart and does not move the ink.

Year view makes it easy to get an overview of your year. Highlight vacations, paydays, holidays, or whatever you want. The ability to ink on a year calendar makes planning easy, intuitive, and meaningful.

Switching between the different views all happens from the menu next to the zoom button. From the drop down pick which view you want to see. I would love to add some sort of gestures for zooming and switching between views but that is not being worked on yet.

Making Ink Calendar look good and work well on Mobile has always been on my mind. I plan to rework the mobile UX to be easier and faster to use. As the app gets more and more complex I understand the importance of keeping the experience usable.

There are so many things I want to do with Ink Calendar, and I cannot work on everything at once so please let me know what the top features you would like to see are. I’ll do my best to prioritize and deliver as much as fast as I can.

Also reviews are a big help! If you have any feedback please let me know! I respond to every piece of feedback. Twitter @TheJoeFin, email support@inkcalendar.com, website Contact, or even the Windows 10 Feedback app:

Thanks for using Ink Calendar!

Joe

1.8 Will Bring Week View

Posted on by TheJoeFin

Ink Calendar 1.8 will bring a week view option to the calendar. This means users can switch between week or month views. Switching happens from a button in the top bar next to the zoom button.

WeekViewButton

In the settings you can change the start and stop times of the week view to fit your needs. Share, save, and print your week calendars just like you can with month calendars.

I find the week view is nice for planning my day and thinking about all the different projects I’ll be working on. Currently there is no calendar support in the week view but I plan on working on that next.

RateReviewBTN

Tucked away under the more button, a new ‘rate and review’ button was added. I would really appreciate a review if you use the app please consider leaving a review. If there is something you want added let me know!

Thanks again for using Ink Calendar!

-Joe

Progress with 1.7

Posted on by TheJoeFin

Update 1.7 is coming along nicely. I have added lots of changes under the hood and I have discovered the source of the crashing when sharing, saving, and printing on mobile.

The changes that I have made under the hood are not tied in so they won’t affect normal app usage. I am still experimenting with how to arrange and organize ink data with relation to the days. It is very simple to associate a month with an ink file, but when you start to move to weeks, or work weeks, or arbitrary date spans it becomes much more tricky.

The source of the crashing of share, print, and save was a result of low ram devices. I tested saving an ink file on device with 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, and 3GB. I’d been doing all of my mobile testing on my Lumia 830 which only has 1GB of RAM and I was experiencing the crashing. When I downloaded a few more mobile emulators I discovered it was related to the available RAM to Ink Calendar.

To remedy this for now I have added a line which checks for the available amount of RAM and enables or disables the buttons accordingly. Long term I would like to find a way to share, print, and save more efficiently and enable those features on more devices, but for now this will have to work.

Thanks again for using Ink Calendar! If you haven’t rated/reviewed Ink Calendar in the app store I would really appreciate it!

-Joe

What’s next for 1.7

Posted on by TheJoeFin

In the next release I plan to focus under the hood. This means improving the way I organize, save, and load data. With more organized data I’ll be able to manage more of it!

For example adding a week view is in the plan. Things that makes that strange. Weeks are not as organized as Months are. Their method of being organized is not as clean and consistent.

This means I’ll need to come up with a system of organizing weeks, their days, and their data. This should not be hard, but it is work that takes time.

In addition to hidden improvements I plan on going after some bugs which prevented some features from being available on mobile. Specifically the share, save, and print capabilities. When I was testing these on mobile without fail they would crash the app every time with no error. This makes debugging harder. I’ll be looking for new ways to tackle and fix this/these bugs in this update.

Thanks for using Ink Calendar! Feel free to contact me on twitter (@TheJoeFin) or email (support@Inkcalendar.com),

-Joe

Version 1.6.3 is on the way!

Posted on by TheJoeFin

This week I’ve been working on adding some intelligence to Ink Calendar. After selecting some ink you can add an appointment to the calendar. Using the Windows Ink APIs the ink will be converted into text and used to build the event.

The simplest implementation of this involves adding the text as the subject of the event on the day the ink is centered. More advanced implementation involves looking for time and using that to set the start time of the event. Furthermore if the ink spans several days the even should span those days as well.

LunchAt1230PMForWeb

This is a first implementation of this technique. Let me know what you think, how well does it work for you? Does it read your ink or not?

As always, thanks for using Ink calendar!

-Joe

 

#1 Requested Feature is right around the corner

Posted on by TheJoeFin

Easily the number one requested feature for Ink Calendar is existing Google and Outlook calendar integration. Soon with version 1.6 that will be possible.

I thought adding the calendars would involve lots of extra authentication and a refactoring of the codebase. However, as it turns out Windows 10 has an API for that. I can request a list of appointments from Windows and all the added calendars will stream in.

The feature works by getting the calendar data from the built-in calendar application. If you have added a calendar there then it gets pulled into Ink Calendar. I’ll be adding more granular control around which calendars you want to include, but I did not want to delay this highly requested feature. I’m excited to roll this feature out soon. Let me know what you think!

Thanks again for using Ink Calendar,

-Joe

Update 1.4 Moving along nicely

Posted on by TheJoeFin

I have finished the majority of the work on update 1.4. While I first thought this would be simply a behind the scenes update there have been a few improvements to the UI and one new setting which was easy to add thanks to the improved code.

I am testing 1.4 now on my devices. Hopefully I will publish it to the Windows store this weekend and the update will arrive next week.

 

Joe

Plans for 1.4

Posted on by TheJoeFin

I am currently working on version 1.4 of Ink Calendar. This version will include many under the hood code improvements and make future features easy to implement. I want to get this update out before the end of the month and hopefully begin working on some awesome new features for September!

Since I am a novice developer a lot of these improvements are me learning how I should have properly written the app from the start. If you’re an experienced UWP dev and would be happy to field some questions, tweet at me @TheJoeFin.

Stay tuned!

– Joe

Ink Calendar 1.3 Update is submitted

Posted on by TheJoeFin

Update 1.3 has been submitted to the Windows Store for approval. The primary feature of this update is ink selection and the ability to cut, copy, and paste the ink. I made some tweaks to the way the calendar gets centered in the frame which should make the app look and feel better as the window gets resized.

There are some issues with pasting the ink on mobile. I do not know if the APIs are supported on Windows 10 mobile because it is a small amount of code to copy the ink but for some reason the app will not paste. For now I have disabled the cut, copy, and paste buttons on mobile because of this issue.

I hope you are enjoying the app!

– Joe