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. 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. This helpfully produces a report showing the final JS file size and the contributions from each CLJS source files.