The Backpack Calendar has a default 6 week view with the current week at the top. The only way to see previous weeks is to expressly go back in time. Otherwise, you're always looking at this week + 5 more weeks ahead.<p><a href="http://backpackit.com/calendar" rel="nofollow">http://backpackit.com/calendar</a>
I'm surprised noone brought this up, but this has been done (several times) before: the one I remember is called DateLens by Bederson et al at UMD (See <a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=972652&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE&CFID=85212779&CFTOKEN=83057884" rel="nofollow">http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=972652&dl=GUIDE...</a>)<p>It's interesting how similar ideas keep coming up every so often.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I have a mental picture of my calendar using the upper-right quadrant of a Cartesian Plane. Days are on the X axis, Hours are on the Y axis. Events go from bottom-up instead of top-down like in all physical day-planners. I formed this mental model when I was very young, which may explain why I can't stand any calendaring apps today.<p>Does anyone else do this? I've seriously considered contacting a calendar manufacturing company to print "Cartesian Calendars" in this manner... or if any such thing already exists, please let me know!
The Agenda view in Emacs's org-mode has similar ideas. In the week view you see great detail for the current day and a short overview of the days to come.<p>Here is a screen-shot I found online: <a href="http://tiny.cc/3gwoj" rel="nofollow">http://tiny.cc/3gwoj</a>
Fantastic idea, though I noted that the author said <i>"I work the same schedule every weekday and I rarely meet with people."</i>, which is something I can't relate to. I meet with a lot of people, regularly.<p>From my perspective:<p>- Last week is important on Monday ... but only on Monday. I do a quick review/plan for the following week and I use data from the previous week for accountability purposes -- as in: Did I deliver on action items from the previous week? I like to get that out of the way on Monday morning so as not to have it hanging over my head the rest of the week.<p>- Some appointments and meetings are more important or come with greater consequences if missed. The day view is dead on, but I'd expand it to be a pad of "Day View" (a.k.a. What's Important hour by hour) at the top with starred items beneath. For instance, my Dentist charges $75 if an appointment is canceled with less than three days notice (this is <i>never</i> enforced, but his time is important, too). My current method is to set a reminder four days before. Once I receive the reminder, I validate that I can make the appointment and reset it to remind me 1 day before hand so that I can cancel anything else that is short-notice that conflicts, then I reset the reminder to 20 minutes prior so that I get off my duff and drive to the Dentist office. I have a similar kludge for important meetings or ones that require a great deal of prep work. Since I check my calendar constantly, I could avoid all of this nonsense if it was just sitting under a thick line beneath my "Day View" as a constant reminder.
I recently found and implemented a nice jQuery calendar plugin called FullCalendar in a client site I'm working on. It was terribly easy to integrate into the site thanks to Django. I think I'm going to tinker with it now to see if I can get it to use this type of display as a view option, since it already offers different view options.
Seems like an idea worthy of some testing and tweaking.<p>I could go for a 3-column (or row, depending on display type) calendar, where the first column shows today in detail, the second column shows the next week in lesser detail, and the final column shows the next month in even less detail.<p>Perhaps clicking on a given day would bring that day into the first column and adjust the rest of the calendar accordingly. A big fat "today" button and arrows to skip by day/week/month would be fantastic.<p>(As the OP says, a better artist would mock this up. I am not a better artist. Sorry.)
I did a quick mockup of a interface that would work for me. You can see both future and past. However you could slide today over to the left and reveal two more future columns if that interests you more.<p>By scrolling/swiping you could change the day with focus. Also by tapping on any visible date, you could give focus to that day. Also a "Today" button to go to the present.<p><a href="http://downloads.clearcove.ca/NonLinearTime.png" rel="nofollow">http://downloads.clearcove.ca/NonLinearTime.png</a>
Outlook's month view lets the scroll wheel scroll through weeks. I've never understood why everything doesn't do that. If I could get real Outlook on my mac I'd drop Apple Mail in a second. It's so much better of a program (even ignoring the exchange parts)
Google Calendar has an Agenda view which simply shows your upcoming events as an ordered list. I use this as my default view and use the monthly view when scheduling new events.
I can't access google calendar at the moment (at work), but when I use it i have it in a view that only shows the next 7 days. This ticks one of the boxes this guy's talking about.<p>As for having an expanded view of today, and a reducing detail view of the following days ... that's a great idea i think.
Thuderbird has a pretty good calendering extension called Lightning. By default it adds a pane to the normal view with upcoming events: "Today", "Tomorrow", and "Soon" for stuff in the following week. I find that tremendously useful, and close to Marco's idea.
Dan Ingalls (the original implementor of Smalltalk) built a weather station that showed the weather on a logarithmic graph. Very cool idea.<p><a href="http://weather-dimensions.com/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://weather-dimensions.com/index.html</a>