Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/kccqzy/smartcal

A smart calendaring app in the browser.
https://github.com/kccqzy/smartcal

Last synced: about 1 month ago
JSON representation

A smart calendaring app in the browser.

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
# Smart Calendar



A smart calendar app that runs completely in your browser with no server needed.



There are already way too many Calendar apps that are free to use. On macOS and

iOS the Calendar app is built-in. On the web, Google Calendar is also free. Why

this?



*   One reason is that I want to build a calendar app inspired by the command

    line. Sure you could copy and rename and delete files using Finder or

    Explorer or Nautilus, but you can also do that just by typing commands into

    a terminal emulator. Many people would find that preferable over using the

    GUI. I want to experiment with the UI of a calendar app in that context,

    trying to see whether exposing a "command language" for calendar operation

    makes sense.



    This command language is not natural language even though at times it feels

    like natural language. The best way to describe it is that it prefers to use

    many keywords instead of symbols; it reads like SQL rather than Perl. Just

    like SQL, it has a definite syntax instead of just trying to reinterpret

    fuzzy natural language, because this is inherently ambiguous. As an analogy,

    again consider SQL; the SQL statements `select age from animals;` and

    `select cats from animals;` are both valid syntactically and feel like

    natural language. But anyone with a modicum of understanding of SQL knows

    that the natural language meaning of the second statement does not match

    that of the semantics in SQL; `select cats from animals;` should instead be

    `select * from animals where species = 'cat';`. And just like this, I intend

    to prioritize precision of meaning over naturalness of the language.



    Just like SQL, although the input is plain text, there is no need for the

    output to be restricted to plain text, like the majority of command-line

    programs. A `select` statement in SQL is plain text but it produces tabular

    results that are well suited for a GUI. Here, I also intend to make this

    calendar command language return results visible in a GUI. That's why this

    runs inside your browser, not your terminal emulator.



*   It purposefully does not support any granularity finer than day. Any

    calendar that manages my day in finer blocks just feels like

    micromanagement. I do not like that. If a calendar is for handling meetings,

    then yes, time granularity would be essential. But this calendar has no

    collaborative features of any kind. It is meant for you to manage your time

    and tasks.



*   In the future, I intend to have support for automatically deciding the exact

    dates for events. For example, you could tell the calendar to schedule a

    "Refactor this code" event *some time in the next week* and it will

    automatically figure out a day in the next week to place that event subject

    to constraints.



## Developing



### Development mode



Start the development server by `clojure -M:develop`.



(The recommended way of using `npx shadow-cljs` to use shadow-cljs unfortunately

didn't work. This alternative way of running shadow-cljs is documented in

[section 3.2.2 of the shadow-cljs

manual](https://shadow-cljs.github.io/docs/UsersGuide.html#deps-edn). It does

not involve downloading shadow-cljs from node.)



Afterwards navigate to localhost:3000 in a browser.



### Unit Tests



Unit tests are run in the browser. It has hot reload just as the main code. When

running `clojure -M:develop`, the unit tests are compiled to JS already. Just

navigate to localhost:3001 in a browser. The test results are then displayed in

the browser.



### Code Formatting



We use `zprint` in its default configuration. Run `clojure -M:fix` to run it on

the two (hard-coded) source files.



### Release Build



To produce a release build, run `clojure -M:release`.