Shiftplan widget released
 

Hi folks,
I just installed and purged again all the calendar apps I could find trying to find one which will allow me to easily do the following.

I'd like to be able to predefine any number of different shifts, which i can then choose from upon tapping an day in a calendar like view. Then an desktop widget would show me what is my next shift, when it starts and time left to it's start. quite like the next alarm widget.

The thing is, we have 14 different shifts and I'm not on any given rotation. I'm only given shift plan one month ahead and so remembering what shift I have is quite tricky. I always need to have the printout around.

Can someone point me in the right direction if there already is such app, or maybe if some of you developers would like to give it a go, please?

Thanks for reading.


EDIT:
Thanks to nicolai, this has come true. It's 98% perfect. 1% being slight cosmetic issues I'd like to have a little differently and the other 1% is a little bug with editing/deleting shifts.

you can get it here in this post

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

Anyone? Please, it would be really helpful to me...

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

+1 for this,

I also do shifts so this could come in quite handy.

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

This would be impossible, as the Calendar application is a closed source app.
What about using the next alarm widget for this.

Can you give me an example how this shift entries would look like,
(start time end time) and how you would like to see them.
Maybe you can make a mockup for the desktop widget.

Nicolai

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

Hey Nicolai, glad you're considering to help us.

I don't really need to have it connected to the original Calendar. Basically what I thought is that upon clicking the widget on desktop. An shift overview would open which would look like and calendar...

But well, I just got another idea. will do a picture. see below...

Next alarm brought me to this idea. But the problem is, I need to set it up each day for the next. Not really that practical.

here comes the picture. Quite self explaining i guess...

you can scroll though weeks with the arrows. In an settings menu, i would be able to define any number of shifts.



Thanks again for looking into this...

Cheers Karel!


*edit* actually an minimalistic look might be more prefered where we'll only see the top part about the next shift and the weekly view would only open on demand.

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

*BUMP which I'm sorry about*

Nicolai, you didn' forget me did you??? :D

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

Hi,

no I didn't forget you, I looked around how other shift remainder
apps are looking.

This would be the difficult part. Making a calendar UI or a UI that
looks like a calendar is difficult. It would be easier if the
calendar app handles the times and you enter your
shifts as regular events. And I can make a widget which
just shows this events.

Or are the shifts simpler than regular calendar events, do they
all have the same start end end time and you only need to
enter the day or recurrences?
Can you give me an example of a shift plan.

Nicolai

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

Oh good. I was worried :)


Entering the shifts into the calendar is the pain which made me ask for this thing in the first place. If there would be a way to predefine the shifts as events and then only quickly choose between them it might work.

But then something like the picture I made might be easier then full calendar?


Nope, my shifts are definitely not simpler and there are no recurrences worth mentioning.

We have:
7 early shifts: S3, S4, S5, E4, E5, E6, EZ
5 late shifts: Q5, L4, L5, L6, LZ
3 night shifts: N2, NS, NQ
(wow it looks scary even for me, when it's writen down like this)

not all has different starting times, but mght be different workload.
like S4 has the same times as E4, but you're doing different stuff.

and as an example my plan for february.
NS, NS, NS, NQ, -, -,Q5, Q5, L4, L6, -, NQ, NQ, NQ, NS, NS, -, -, S4, E4, E5, E5, -, -, L4, L4, L4, L4


Thanks again for looking into this.

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

Uhm. Just giving it another try.... :D

Re: Question: Working shift "reminder" widget
 

Interesting... Maybe this concept can be expanded into seperate app and widget.

App: Based on a csv/txt file, we should be able to chose the shift name for dates in a month and the events would be automatically created in the calender. The event names should follow a simple and uniform pattern.

Widget: Only event names in particular regex format will be displayed.

NOTE: the csv/txt file will be something like

Name,start,end
S3,1000,1500
S4,1500,2000


The advantage would be the reusability. The shift timings, names, etc can easily be modified by the user by modifying the txt/csv file. Also, instead of shifts, it can be used to define anything else, like show timings (if you're a performer), class timings (for students), etc.

What do you think?