Hi everyone,
I’ve posted on this topic a few times, but with the launch of coda 3.0 I thought it might be interesting to see if any of my thoughts resonate with others in this community.
The handling of calendars and timelines are the last piece of the puzzle for me in creating truly incredible business doc-apps inside coda.
Things like room booking systems, project management of any type, personnel management etc all require some work on both timelines and calendars.
What do I mean?
First - timelines. I have in the past used these for showing a bunch of data over time, but there is a flaw in the current setup. You cannot have more than one date set (start and end) on a line.
This severely limits what can be shown. For instance, our business provides licenses for others to use some of our creations for set periods. If we renew a license, it can only be displayed on another line in our timeline of licenses, which quickly fills up the page.
Or, when trying to make a bookings system for even 3 or 4 rooms, your only possible view is calendar, which really isn’t great for long term projects and trying to resource. All the major data-base platforms in media use timeline views, but in horizontal lines across a page, where you can have milestones viewable in one line and resources in others.
For example, a few views from cirkus - which is a cool system, but could be SO much better written in coda.
You get the picture. Now I realise this isn’t the easiest thing to do with “row” paradigm - you’d end up with tonnes of columns for different start and end dates.
But instead having a tag on rows (a column with a lookup of different tags) which could mean all those rows are grouped together in the timeline would be extremely useful.
And of course the forgotten child - the calendar. The current view just doesn’t make it easy to use for either scheduling or seeing what is going on in a business. If you have 5 or 6 projects, it quickly fills up. We often have 10+ projects at once, and you just cannot display that information. You can see it on a timeline view, but then you cannot see milestones at the same time, or look at tasks along a timeline in order to resource people to do the work etc.
Enabling a wider view by default (without having to choose full screen) would help a tonne.
As would enabling different formatting inside a cal event. At the moment, it is extremely hard to put in information that is readable yet contains enough info. We fudge it, but its not great.
See this booking :
I can’t even see the project name (but get the project number)
Nor will it display the full booking length (which we do so it can be seen in monthly view)
etc.
Can anyone else think of major use cases where the current calendar and timelines could really help with if they had a review/had some other features added?
I’d love to hear folks thoughts on this - and also thoughts from within coda about it. I’ve learnt tonnes about coda in the last 2 years, and our own system needs a complete re-write, which we are madly budgeting for in order to hopefully get a member of this community to make for us. However, without improvements on this side, we need to use another system alongside coda, which will complicate data in and out / make a tonne of systems complex - and make it harder for staff (and freelancers).
Ok - over to others.
Cheers, Brendan